song for the dumped

...and don't forget
to give me back my black t-shirt

A short and amusing? painful? vignette to share with you. Today has actually been a stressful day, and thinking about this strange little story has been a twitchy distraction. I decided to write about it as a sort of confession that even with my adorable Hubs and all the good and newness, sometimes the old and badness creeps up out of nowhere. This time in response to the perpetually gracious, smiling face of Epic Ex's friendly wife.

Epic Ex's wife made a bee-line for me after church on Sunday. I saw her coming at a quick clip, with Epic Ex in tow, and was a little perplexed during the 5.2 seconds it took her to cross the sanctuary to where I stood with Yale, talking to some friends. She turned to me, smiling, and handed me a now-tattered copy of one of my favorite books, declaring "We were cleaning this weekend and realized that this is actually yours." Sure enough, there was my name scrawled on the inside cover, which she opened to show me. Epic Ex grimaced apologetically behind her "I wasn't sure if maybe it was better to just keep it at this point, but anyway, we decided to give it back. I flipped through it and found this impressive vocabulary list on a piece of notebook paper". I blushed with embarrassment to remember that I used to always keep a list of words to look up in books when I read them. I prayed that all the words were obscure, GRE-type words that he couldn't define on command.

I thanked them, admitted that I had, in fact, been looking for that book for about 5 years, and had even accused my brother of borrowing it and never giving it back. We shared a laugh, and Ex requested that I apologize to my brother for him. I thanked them again, and shoved the book into my bag with the hot flush of AWKWARD heating my face and neck.

It wasn't really this book that flustered me. It was "the books". The books that you give one another when you're dating, and write flowery things in the front cover, and assume that no one else will ever see what you jotted in the throes of gift-giving romance. It was the book that I returned to him, after the break-up, with the (now woefully pathetic) Yeats poem stuck inside for him to find someday and read. You never imagine your Ex's future wife finding something like that. Ugh.

Anyway. Insecurity sneaks up on me sometimes. It shouldn't matter, right? We're all married up now, and friends, sort of. Friendish. Friendly. His wife has never been anything but warm to me. If anyone has been weird about the whole thing, it has been me. Getting better all the time, but still, for some reason, still looking at myself as "THE DUMPED". Sheesh. After all these years, it's about time I just get the hell over myself, huh?