Ex-Flame: What in the Blazes!

It’s a strange feeling – bumping into you ex after years. First it’s like, “Hey honey, good to see you.” You get all nostalgic and try catching up on lost time, make mundane enquiries like what’s been going on each other’s lives... yappetty yappetty yap… And then, without warning, your ‘once significant other’ drops the bomb – they still have ‘feelings’ for you!

Unlike the picture perfect world we’d like to live in, reality has something else in store for us. Not all former flames can reconcile with the idea of being relegated to the status of ‘just good friends’. They want more. From you. They want to walk back into your life without much ceremony and, most importantly, they want access to your bedroom again. They somehow carry around this pre-conceived notion that if your ex is nice to you, you still got chances. What in the blazes!

As you must have guessed already, I bumped into an ex today. Our break up was not messy because it was not technically a break up in the first place. We’d simply drifted apart while trying to realise our respective dreams. His dreams were bigger than mine, so he made a bigger move - a move that involved shifting his base to another continent. I respected his guts to chase his dream.

Today that respect was lost. Right after he asked me if there were any chances of us getting together back again and what a mistake he had made by letting me go. It was obvious he was down and out. I wanted to tell him “we made certain choices, so now we have to live with the consequences”. But I didn’t. Simply because I knew my words would be lost on a loser – and when I say loser I mean not in the materialistic sense of the word but as in a person who has lost all sense of self-respect. And that knowledge made me more miserable than I had been when I'd lost him years ago.