Old Boyfriends

I love my old boyfriends. Each and every one of them. A few, I love to hate, but that's okay, because they deserve it.

I really don't "see" any of my old boyfriends ever. The majority don't live in the same state as I do. But I see some on the tron-esque landscape of the internet. Not all of them. One of them defriended me on facebook, you may remember. One of them, I check to make sure he's still on facebook and not dead, but I am sort of afraid to friend. There's even one whose last name I don't remember and therefore, I cannot find.

But I love their little voices from the past. I don't know why. There is just something so sweet and nostalgic about talking to a lost love (or even fling) as an actual grown-up. Finding out things that I never knew when we were dating. Things we never talked about, but were there all the same.

One of them writes poetry. Okay, look at me. I'm sorry. Probably, they all write poetry, but if I were to rank them all in order of likelihood of poetry writing, this one would have been at the bottom.

One of them got an English Lit degree, which is totally my thing and sort of made me feel defensive. We dated a long, long time (for that age anyway) and never once discussed books. That's weird for me, because mostly I can't help but discuss books. I am much more likely to know what kind of books you like than what kind of car you drive. But this guy, it just never came up. And there he is with a whole degree in reading.

One of them grew a beard, which I think looks a little serial-killery, but whatever. I can't tell him what to do anymore and I'm actually pretty ecstatic about that.

Which makes me think, that maybe, who you end up with is the person who is easiest with which to talk about the things that matter. Okay, crazy sentence, but hear me out. These guys (although a few treated me pretty bad at the time) none of them are crazies, none of them are evil, none of them are terrible human beings. They are, in short, the good ones. Maybe I passed over them (or they over me) because I never got around to figuring out if they write poetry or what they read or if they want to look like a man who lives in a van down by the river.

And I wonder what they didn't know about me. I think I'm pretty much an open book. I like to argue, I like to talk and I like to babble about the things that make me happy. So, maybe there isn't anything. But maybe they don't know that I'm obsessed with Counting Crows, that I will defend Buffy the Vampire Slayer as modern literature to the death, that my two favorite books of all time are probably Pride and Prejudice and IT and that I understand that probably makes me look schizo, but I'm okay with that. Maybe I never shared my morbid curiosity about Charles Manson, or how I watch Steel Magnolia's sometimes just so I can cry or how I hate to make supper, but love to cook for parties.

I love and adore my husband. I fully believe that we were "meant to be" in all the Disney glory of the phrase. But maybe it's our ability to discuss stuff that makes us meant to be. I'm pretty sure he knew all of that about me and more before we even dated. And I knew all kinds of weird crap about him. I knew that he writes poetry, and that he likes a lot of the same books that I do, but occasionally reads something that makes me look at him like an alien. And I knew that I'd never be able to get rid of his beard.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is, other than I just had one of those moments and was feeling all nostalgic and thought I would pour it out to the internet because that's what I do. Maybe that this is one of the up sides to social networking, is that I know all of this crap now. Or maybe the point is that people are never as 2-D as you see them in your memory. Or maybe the point is that you never have all the info. Maybe there is no point. Maybe this is just a moment in my present that will be gone in a few more seconds and I wanted to preserve it. I'm not sure.