Why is it that now, of all times, I find my mind constantly drawn back to thinking about my ex? Now, many months since we split up and almost as long since we last communicated? Now, when I’m starting a new life in a new city and a new country. Now when so much is happening? For weeks I’ve barely thought about him at all, and then, during the last few days before leaving the UK, the thoughts started to resurface. Not distressing, not even particularly strong. Just a constant low grade wondering how he’s doing and whether he’s reached a point where we could talk about things.
Perhaps it’s that, having started a new life myself, it nags me to have these little bits of the past left unresolved because of his unwillingness to talk. Perhaps because of the anger still inside me that I have never expressed to him. Perhaps because, having come so far in my own healing and personal growth, I have an irrational hope that maybe he has made a little progress himself, and might be open to a real discussion. Or is it just that, in transit, I have had a lot of time to think and my mind just drifts back into the worn old tracks?
In my memory he is two people – one that was open, affectionate and vividly alive, and as I thought at the time, honest and committed to truth and personal growth and communication. That person I would love to hear from again because I truly loved him. But he was suddenly replaced by someone very different, someone arrogant and driven by fear. Someone who, despite his claims, was unable to face up to the truth, and who took out so much of his pain on me at a time when I was utterly open and vulnerable to him. That person I would also like to speak to again – but with a very different purpose. I want to tell him clearly what he did and how he hurt me. I want to express the anger that I started to feel only after he had closed off communication between us. I want to make him see, not that I was perfect, because I wasn’t, but how unrealistically negative a picture of me he constructed in his mind towards the end.
These two versions of him are very different – but either way, I find myself wanting to speak to him.
But it’s fairly academic. Given our last conversation, I don’t see how anything good will come out of a conversation that I initiate. And with each day that has gone past, it seems less and less likely that he will ever have the maturity and courage to face up to the way he behaved towards me and initiate contact from his side. So communication remains as unlikely as ever.
Part of learning to let go is learning to live with the incompleteness and the messiness, the words unsaid. I have come a very long way in doing that, and rebuilding what really matters to me. And tomorrow I start my new job, which will give me more than enough to occupy heart and mind. I suspect that this period of wistful memory will soon vanish in the rush of new things to do.
But sometimes those loose ends still itch.
Words that sing 