5 Honest Thoughts About Sleeping With My Ex

A writer is a writer because we are all struck by that internal chaos to sit down and furiously type our expression-of-self. Creativity strikes at any given moment. Taking a pee, smoking a cig, standing at a crowded bar yelling for a vodka soda for the sixth time. Something…something. A little caterpillar crawling up our gut, screaming make me a butterfly, write this shit down!

So I huddle and run to my computer, try to execute this feeling of “why am I sleeping with my ex?” Because it is fun, because I wish I could be evil, because I like to pretend my heart is a little black pit that swallows up love and doesn’t give it back. But that is not it. I am nice, I care, I still love no matter how or why it ended. That is a different story.

1. Sex is comfortable.

You know what I like. Cool, don’t gotta explore that fetish with a complete stranger. What about NOT increasing my number? Thank god I dodged that bullet. Also, you can still hold me after. We fall asleep together and it’s just like old times when I thought your stupid mind would never break my poor, poor, stupid heart. But you did so…

2. Sometimes I cry.

It happened to me the other night. We were cuddling on the couch and I held him oh so close like the sweet everlasting boy/man child that he is and there it was, fucking emotions. I felt tears rise from my gut, up my face, burn my cheeks a little. Tears spit out of my cold, grey eyes. I was sad. Genuinely sad because I knew in this moment he wanted to tell me he loved me. I could hear the echo in his brain almost as clear as if he had actually said it. I wanted to say it too. But now there is just cracked glass between us and we can’t find our shoes. So we hover over the broken mirror. I’m on the right, he’s on the left and we hug, a distant hug without embracing each other enough to put our feet in the glass. Ouch.

3. It will never be the same.

I cannot bring him around my friends. My friends once loved him so much, almost as much as I did. He’s the one, they’d sometimes say. But he “showed himself” on a webcam to a stranger who threatened to blackmail him, and I found the messages three days later. I’m not sure why I’m telling you Internet strangers this, but I will never bring him around ANYONE again. I mean hello, they all know what he did. Can we just go ahead and hashtag awkward Thanksgiving because my mom knows what you did last summer, really.

4. It’s capital-D Different.

It’s different but the same. It’s the same but different. We are still these molds of a person who become one when my legs spread and his enclose on all that I am. It is nice, it feels marvelous, but afterwards I look at him across my cheap plate of enchiladas, telling the friendly-faced server to “split the bill.” ‘Cause we are just friends? Friends that tell each other we love each other and goddamn we still do but not the way we used to. Because above all else, it will NEVER be the same. My heart was broken, I cried alone in the shower, at the dinner table, in a crowded bar. I’m sure he did his fair sure too. I know he did. We were both so hurt by the other being ripped from our vulnerable little hearts that we can never fall back in to that same, comfortable cushion of love we once always carried around.

5. So why?

This is the easiest meditation on the list. Why go back to what we already know? Why go back to what we know has no future? Because — comfort. Just like staying in a job you absolutely hate, you know how to do it. Like photographing a million babies when you just want to photograph a naked woman. Baby photography is what pays, and of course they’re so cute, of course. It is known, it is familiar, and it is safe. But safe is never fun. Eventually I will grow tired of sprinting for miles in tiny little circles around a man-made pond. I will just say fuck it and dive in. Swim to the bottom, it will open into a river that carries me to the ocean. Safe is never fun, only temporary, only until we decide to move on.