April: Unexpected Encounters [Fukubukuro 2011]

It doesn’t get much worse than running into an ex unprepared. I’m being hyperbolic, of course, but it is easily one of my least favorite things. There’s always that awkward period of smalltalk and catching up to do and you’re always thinking, “Man, I wish I’d picked a better shirt to wear today.” I mean, ultimately it shouldn’t matter, right? Yet whenever I do I usually end up feeling dopey and kicking myself for not being cooler.

There’s no way I’m alone in this. I mean, everyone wants to look and be their coolest in front of people who can no longer have them. It’s pretty much human nature. “Look at the mistake you made. You could have had this.”

So it sucks when you’re at an early-season ballgame with your friends and you run into a girl you briefly dated, especially when she’s wearing that shirt that made you dig her in the first place AND your new girlfriend is absent. My brain just couldn’t wrap itself around not caring, so it bugged me for the rest of the game, heck, the rest of the week.

Then there’s the other kind of unexpected encounter. The kind where everything is planned out and no surprises are on the table, but you end up shocked at the end anyway. A good friend of mine that I was way into for something around three years (anyone who knows me well probably knows who this is) came home for spring break and, like always, we set up a time to hang out and catch up. Pretty routine stuff, except it was all different.

I’ve been in long relationships that took forever to get over and I’ve been in short, brief flings that burned bright and burned out, but the one weird thing about both for me is that they always seem to end the same way. One day she means a lot to me and I can’t stop thinking about her and the next…it’s like it never happened. It’s also the kind of thing that you can’t really judge until you’re around the person. I thought I was over it plenty a time until I saw her and realized I wasn’t.

This time it was different. I saw her and the rose-colored glasses were gone. Some of the little things I thought were cute before ceased to be. I didn’t have that sinking, weird feeling in my stomach. In a way it was sad, but it was also super liberating. I felt better about myself than I had in a long time. All I could think when I went to bed that night was, “I’m free.”