This music video encompasses the rollercoaster of emotions I’ve endured the past few days. Fuck, this is such a foreign feeling for me, I’m not even sure where I should begin. But like any good story, I suppose I’ll start to as close to the beginning as I can.
“And I’ll be happy for you, if you can be happy for me. Circles and triangles and now we’re hanging out with your new girlfriend…so far from where we’ve been, I know we’re cool.” The melancholic undertones of this video are palpable to me.
We were friends long before anything physical happened. For years, we chatted online, met in person, and shared secrets. Karl was my cheerleader and confidant…and I kept his deepest thoughts to myself. I entered his world like a typhoon, stirring shit up. I was the willful wild one while he was the serious one. He found my ridiculousness endearing yet exasperating.
I felt that he was willing to overlook all that for a chance at having a family together but I was not about that life. People would ask me, “Don’t you want babies?” My reply every time was, “I am the baby.” I could barely take care of myself, let alone another human being. Plus, I found out at an early age that I’m not particularly maternal. While my friends were playing with babies and fantasizing about their magical weddings, I was sitting thinking there wondering which skills I needed to acquire in order to propel me into a boujie lifestyle. <insert> If you ain’t got no money, take your broke ass home. </insert> I didn’t hide it, he knew that I didn’t want to have children and so we both knew that this situationship was not going to progress.
Fast forward, we’re dating other people but still remain in contact with one another. We will do the cordial, “How are your parents? Your family? When are you going to settle down?” Every now and then, we would grab a meal together and burst out laughing when talking about the past and how unhinged I was. We’d end the get-together by hugging each other and saying, “Till next time”.
That “till next time” was a few days ago. Out of the blue, I decided to text Karl to see if he wanted to catch up on old times. He quickly responded back and we agreed to meet for supper nearby. As I was nearing the restaurant, I received a text from him letting me know that his girlfriend would be accompanying us.
Great. I wasn’t particularly excited to meet her because I was not dressed up for the occasion nor was I sure if I had the bandwidth to be on my best behavior. Then I thought, “Does my makeup look okay? Well, I guess it’s too late now.” I’m one of those girls who will dress up for other girls but not so much for men. Women are so fucking critical and judgy. Ugh. My original plan was to just shoot the shit and chill that evening but I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
I sat at the bar, and a random dude a few seats down locked eyes with me and smiled. Ugh. I waited quietly for them (they were looking for parking), went on Yelp to take a look at the reviews and tried to figure out what I was going to order. Shortly afterward I heard a familiar voice behind me. I turned around and there he stood with his girlfriend.
It was bittersweet meeting his girlfriend. She wasn’t quite who I imagined him to be with but I was cognizant of what was transpiring. She is much younger than him and I could understand his urgency as he wanted so badly to be a father and to have a family. Tick tock, tick tock. I could feel and hear his internal biological clock ticking loudly.
She was fairly intriguing. I won’t lie and say that she didn’t have depth to her, when in fact, she was quite multi-faceted. She told me about herself and what she was currently studying. She boasted about him paying for everything…and also doing their laundry. That was when I realized that they were living together. I can’t tell you why in my head I thought Karl would still be single and living alone…so for me to reach out and have an impromptu supper with him seemed a bit disrespectful, especially to her (at least that’s what I thought, and of course, she would want to see who is calling her boyfriend out spontaneously).
I saw how he was around her and there was such a vast difference with how he was with me. I was immediately transported to the past. Yes, we fed one another, slept in the same bed, and went on vacations. Now, I’m in the present and it punched me in the heart and brain so hard I was left open-mouthed for a minute. The way he looked at her, called her affectionate names (thank God it wasn’t the same names he used to call me), and mentioned having babies multiple times took my breath away. He was extremely delicate with her. It was jarringly different from what we had then and what he has now.
A part of me wondered if things would have worked out if I had changed my mind about motherhood. Could this have been me, sitting in her spot? For a fleeting moment, I felt regret and dejected. There was a touch of wistfulness for a nanosecond. Then I was back into the present and they are lovingly staring at each other…as if the rest of the restaurant had disappeared into the background and it was just the two of them and I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.
I’m not sure how I survived the night but I managed to hold my own. When we left the restaurant, they offered to walk me to my car. I kindly declined. I wanted to decompress and be lost in my thoughts…and my feet were killing me (I was wearing heels for seven hours). I drove home in silence. No radio, no podcast, nothing. Just me and my fucked up thoughts.
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