None of My Exes Live in Texas

Good God! How many ex-boyfriends do I have? Crap. I can't even keep them straight. How many have I written about now? Four? Five? Okay, well here comes number six.

Got an email a couple of weeks ago from the next to last. He was one of my professors. Before you all go thinking I didn’t deserve that “A,” we didn’t get involved, involved until after the semester was over. This was three years ago.

It was a meeting of the minds in a lot of ways. He was my friend first. Kind of. We met for coffee once while the class was still going on, and we did have a mad email thing going on. The attraction was there, for sure. On RateMyProfessor.com he has some hot chili peppers next to his profile, and he was oh-too-cool-for-school.

Did it go well? Well, you tell me:

As soon as the semester was over, and I’m thinking “Game on!” he was off to Germany for two weeks. To his credit, he did call me to tell me he was leaving when he was on the way to the airport. Then, he emailed me from Germany and Norway and called me on his way home, so that was nice.

Then, it all went to shit. And this was at the beginning of our relationship!

Fundamentally, we were the same person. Me and the guy I met in the classroom, I mean. The people we were outside the classroom… Not so much.

It ended badly. Was there ever any question? So, I sat down, wrote some really wretched poetry, and, shortly afterward, moved out of state. And in hindsight, that was a blessing. We talked a couple of times, but it was obvious to both of us, I think, that the relationship was broken beyond repair.

So, lesson learned, and we both moved on.


So, you can imagine my surprise when I got an email from him. My finger hovered over the delete key for a minute before I changed my mind and emailed him back. And now I've gotten a very nice email in response.

To be fair, he has tried to keep in contact here and there. He’s a very nice man. I still remember the time that I got so sick right after the first time we broke up, and he left work to take me to the doctor’s office.

And he was super allergic to cats, but he would take allergy medicine before he came over to hang out with me, just so he could tolerate being in the same house with the Dog's cat. The poor guy would still get hives, though!

See? Nice.

It’s just weird. When I say it ended badly, I’m not exaggerating. Bad. Bad badly. He doesn’t remember it that way. Hmm…

Do you ever wonder how much of reality is just your own perception of it?