Sleeping Dogs

Well, I don't know about you guys, but I have this thing I do with ex-boyfriends.

It's called stalking.

Well, not stalking, exactly. But hey, when a 9-year marriage unexpectedly explodes in your face like a pipe bomb, your first instict (actually, second, after getting blindly drunk and throwing up cheap red wine in your bathroom), is to google all your old boyfriends to try and conjure some easy, no-strings-attached, somewhat nostalgic sex.

This was over a year ago, when I did this. And although I did find a few old boyfriends, and at least a couple who were willing to have some sex (one of whom was even in a relationship at the time, ick), I never actually went through with it.

See, in order to reconnect with a lover from my past, I'd have to actually acknowledge that he still exists in real time.

I don't want to do that.

I don't want to accept that he isn't exactly as I left him, say, in 1995, sitting on a Salvation Army couch in a cheap rental house, wearing a faded Giants baseball hat and Jesus and Mary Chain tee shirt, rolling a cigarette and begging me not to leave him.

I would have to allow for the possibility that after I walked out that door, so many years ago, to continue my life, that he actually kept living his too. He actually got over me leaving him. He went on to grad school. He slept with other women. Maybe even married one. Maybe even had a child or two.

Ugh.

No way.

Maybe I'm a narcissist. But I prefer to remember these guys as they were: Youthful, wrinkle-free, flat- stomached, patchouli-scented. Without shattered dreams or blackened, cirrhosed livers. Without cancerous moles or stints in rehab.

Truthfully, I don't really want to know what happened next. And if forced to imagine it, I like to picture them ten, fifteen years later, still in exactly the same place. Sitting on the same fugly, fourth-hand wool couch that smelled like Pabst Blue Ribbon. Having perhaps moved to a dingy apartment over someone's garage, but still depressed and lonesome ever since we broke up, surrounded by empty bottles of Jack, porno mags, and crumpled pieces of notebook paper containing unfinished, hand-scrawled poems about a mysterious dark-haired girl.

This, my dear friends, is what keeps me going. Facebook, with it's 'email friend finder' and similarly evil connective devices, keeps trying to punch holes in my transparent, ignorant bliss. But I prefer to stay in my protective, nescient bubble for as long as I can.

So there it is. Say what you will about me. But let me hang on to the tiny morsels of happiness that I've got.