Ex Implosion.

And as quickly as I was pulled in, and he was pulled in, the feedback loop gained fever pitch and now the whole damn thing's ex/imploded.

Ex-Imploded.

That is one thing I should definitely know better about. The ex always wins.

I lose.

Which isn't to say he's gone back to her. That's what she'd like, but it hasn't happened...yet. He wants to be alone to be upset about the aftermath of her, he doesn't feel it's fair for me to be around when he's got to deal with it. She cropped up on Halloween, wearing no costume, but she may well have been sporting some mask with warts and her long red hair filled with bats and spiders; she continues to bewitch him. Double, double, toil and trouble...

My head hurts trying to wrap itself around this, which shouldn't be hard since I've been through this half a dozen times already. "I'm over it" becomes "I don't want to be with her" once she's appeared somewhere out of the blue--and in this case, began texting/calling/emailing and finally lured him to their old place, a place of comfort and nostalgia and memory to tell him she loves him dearly and would do anything to get him back--and despite insisting no interest in returning to that past, it always turns into some level of not being able to handle it, "it" being my relationship with them, or their scattered, damaged feelings for that now proverbial...her.

And it's galling because I go through that constantly. I'm always muddling through the leftovers for an ex, to varying degrees, and it's often the new, differently loving relationship that makes it possible for me to sort those feelings out. There's safety in the walls of an embrace that lets my brain seek out the dark corners where some as of yet unrifled memory lies. I know the panic, and the torturous detritus, I know that it doesn't mean I want them back.

But I lose.

He and I haven't been as connected the past two weeks. Shortly after we got back from our magickal Ely weekend playing Scrabble in the woods, I went a bit dead. Got all distance-y, felt little more than the concept of feelings other than a general sickness in the gut. It is telling that the ex showed up just a few days after this feeling set in; it seems to me a bit of pre-cognition was on the wind and the universe was letting me know something was shortly to become amiss. But, I was also, somewhere deep in the subconscious layers of this love, freaking the fuck out. We began so hard and fast, I told him I loved him on the third date, I spoke of marriage and babies and life forever. I got so excited because it seemed...possible. For once. Really, truly possible. We get excited about the same houses, the same neighborhoods, the same way of living, the same home decor; old things, dead things, weird things, dilapidated things. Walking or driving about is a homey adventure with him; calling out houses we're going to take over and make our own. I've thought I was bound to marry a couple other people, but in hindsight, and even in the course of the relationship, I could have given you a hundred reasons why it shouldn't happen. One didn't believe in love; wanted to raise his children without the word. The other found very little more than a passing interest in all things sexual (a champion snuggler, though). Both of those should have been known deal breakers from the start, but I'm stubborn, and I was deeply heartbroken by the dissolution of both of those relationships, which were both my decision to end. The only red flag in this current love has been the ex, which is always a red flag, but again, I'm stubborn, and I fell for him, with all his Sarah-Manual reading/knowing/intuiting ways. And neither of us has been much like anyone else we've ever been with, which adds a sparkle to it--New! Improved! love. But I did freak out, and I felt myself reigning in previous Big Statements of Marriage, Kids, and Forever. Of course, this was happening simultaneous to the ex wreaking emotional havoc on him, and the past couple days he and I have been working a disastrous feedback loop, which feels like a sort of heaven in comparison to the dead, distanced feelings I've had the past couple weeks, but I don't much like this opera either.

A walk down by Minnehaha Creek, discussing how rad it would be to come across a dead body down there but how it would be unlikely given the fact that the hoi polloi would be unlikely to dump a body in the land of the bourgeoisie. That was ideal, that was Andy n me, that was Friday. Hot chocolate, snuggled under a blanket, reading our respective books (2666-his, the God Delusion-mine) was lovely too. That was only Sunday. Monday night we had a fight over the phone, due mostly to my menstrual state, which led me to get my panties in a bunch quite a lot more than I likely would have; I just wanted to fight. Well, it sent him into another tailspin.

Too much can happen in a day.