Oof. Best of luck to your bro figuring things out, LD. It's a hell of a time to be starting things anew like that. Take it from the guy scraping by in New York right now.
IF YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT STRAGO'S RAMBLINGS ABOUT HIS RECENTLY-ENDED RELATIONSHIP, SKIP THIS POST. YE HATH BEEN WARNED.
So one of my good friends from college recently became 5% owner of a new paintball company near Boston, and I drove up (with a couple other friends who are still in school) Saturday morning to do a bit of a test run. 15 or so people total, we played for a good three hours. Holy hell was that a good time. I'd never played before, but most assuredly will again. It's just a complete blast.
After that I ended up spending the night in Boston with my friends. On Sunday, instead of just heading back to Brooklyn as I'd planned... well, Saturday night I got an e-mail I'd been expecting from my ex-girlfriend. The idea had been that after two weeks of radio silence she'd e-mail me to see how I was doing, if I felt like talking about things, etc. What surprised me was that she suggested perhaps meeting in person, instead of just talking on the phone. What surprised me more was that my reaction was "Huh. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea." So I ended up spending most of Sunday on the ol' campus. The ex-lady and I took a long walk and talked for two or three hours. It was... hard. And emotionally intense. But also really good. It definitely confirmed for me that I was done with the relationship, and in many ways had been since before it actually ended. The talk also helped me to put a bead on some things about our relationship's dynamic that... well, while I always had an unconscious awareness of them that I wasn't addressing at all, I can now see them in pretty stark relief. I also got a chance to take her to task for some ways in which she was pretty straight-up shitty to me over the past year. It wasn't aggressive, I wasn't there to fight. But it was good -- for both of us, I think -- to have me subvert the dominant paradigm of our interactions and just tell her how things stood/stand without worrying about her feelings or assume that she was more right about something/anything than I was.
It was also pretty clear on both of our parts that we still care about each other, and there's still a kind of love there. And that we really, really don't want to cut each other out of our life entirely. So now we embark on the long process of figuring out when and how to have a friendship. First step is another two weeks of non-contact, after which I'll email her and see if she wants to start figuring out some ground-rules for how we do interact: e-mail, G-chat, hanging out in groups of friends, etc. Frankly I'm not entirely convinced, still, that we won't end up together again some day. But I'm 100% sure that it isn't what I want right now, or even in the foreseeable future.
Hrmm. Yup. Intense, occasionally confusing (but more enlightening, on balance), and hard. But also extremely good. I feel good.
WHOOPS DID I TURN THE GOOD MORNING TOPIC INTO A BLOG SORRY DUDES HA HA
Ahem. Oh, and after talking with the ex I hung out with friends on campus and joined some of them as a guest PC in a smallish D&D campaign they've been running, which was extremely awesome. Yay!
Next step in life: get a drink with the extremely attractive girl who graduated with me, had a crush on me for all of last year, and also lives in Brooklyn. Woo.
