It's like Miriam read my mind

The only thing I can say about my friend Miriam Datskovsky's column is that every single word rang (sadly) very, very true. Read it all if you've ever had your heart broken, or broken someone else's. Read it if you think you know all about any of us from that New York magazine round table.

It amazes me how much that girl knows, at 20, that at 30 I am still learning. She even has a Tasti D-Lite reference. I was wrong when I wrote that story because IT NEVER ENDS. Maybe it lessens and morphs but it's still not something I'm okay with, I'm rational about, that I don't cry or regret or want to punch the wall about. I try to ignore it and that mostly works, except when I can't, and it's so complex it makes me wish I were drinking heavily again. But I'm not, so I deal, and I surround myself with people like Miriam and everyone else who just gets me, and likes me for me. People like Heidi and Nichelle and Allison and Shari and Ellen and Claudia and Elise and Susie and Kambri and Sira and Morgan and Jon. People who have managed to touch my heart and peer inside my brain and my soul in ways I coulud never have imagined, and who are irreplaceable for that. People who I will hopefully never stop being friends with.

I’ve often thought how much easier it would be if love were linear, if our feelings had start and end points. If love were linear, we would move on quickly and painlessly from every person we were ever intimately involved with. If love were linear, we would never second-guess ourselves when we were intimately involved. But the truth of the matter is that our feelings aren’t anything close to linear: half the time we don’t know whom we have feelings for or how much we actually feel for them. This makes knowing when to end a relationship extremely difficult and gauging a relationship’s worth next to impossible.

Stupid may not have been the best way to describe my expectation that I could be friends with my ex. I am close friends with my other ex, after all. No, I wasn’t stupid—ambitious, maybe, and unable to recognize when I was pushing myself too far. Because even when we think we’ve moved on, even when we think we no longer care two shits about someone, we can still break down and lose it. There isn’t anything wrong with wanting to be friends with an ex. There’s also nothing wrong with realizing that may not be possible.