Working Backward - Part 2

My early 20s were a time when I made a combination of good and bad decisions.  As much as I had hoped that the decisions and consequences would leave me armed with a wisdom to avoid making the same mistakes again in my 30s, it appears that I will continue to make mistakes for a long time to come.  It didn't take sleeping with a married man to bring this realization.  I knew I was going to make mistakes.  I just never figured this would be one of them.  This exact scenario is one that I had so fully grown out of and grown from.  Or, so I thought.

But there I was, sitting next to him, hiding.  This is one of the things that I had enjoyed most about it the first time around.  He and I had to sneak everywhere.  My friends couldn't know.  His friends couldn't know.  Things had to be kept under wraps due to his friendship with my boss and because of his marriage, of course.  That require he and I be the only people that knew about our tryst.  It truly was a tryst.  Like I said, we had sex a handful of times.  Maybe 5, including the time I gave him head at my old job. But, our 'relationship' spanned more than a year.

So, I returned to the scene of the crime.  We agreed to meet at a bar.  He wasn't there when I got there, so I went to the restroom, checked my face, ordered a drink and nervously waited.  I felt like I had in my early 20s.  It was a familiar feeling that I had missed.  I was excited.  It's been somewhere between 5 and 6 years since I last saw him.  And we hadn't met like this in around 7 years.  My memory and my math might be a little shaky on this one.  But I remember the important parts.

He was a lover that I fell for.  It wasn't casual.  It was never just a fuck.  He was someone that I spent hours  with in a day.  As we were sitting at the bar I asked him if he had taught me to play chess.  While playing a game of chess on a date some time last week, I had thought about him and tried to recall if he taught me.  He said "No. We actually learned together."  It was true.  Now I remember it well.  We did learn together.

I learned a lot of things around that time.  Things were still fresh.  I hadn't had a long relationship.  My heart had never been broken.  I had only just discovered love at all. It was so fresh and new, I had thought for a brief period that I was in love with The Married Man, but I am pretty sure I wasn't.  At any rate, I am not in love with him now.  But, I do miss him.

This is what I do.  I move away.  I move on and then I romanticize the past.  I don't do it as much any more.  I just had the realization today that I miss my ex for who he was.  But until now, I had painted him as a villain.  It is what I had to do to get through.  But, The Married Man had never had to take the role of the villain.  So, as we sat at the bar joking and remembering, I fell back into it.

I miss home.  I miss my family and my old neighborhood.  I miss my friends and the shops I used to frequent.  I miss my routine and I miss my life here.  For one night, he became a way to get a sliver of it back.  I come back to my old neighborhood every time I am in town.  I still get my eyebrows done in my old neighborhood from the same woman that has done them for the past 10 years.  I still stop off at my favorite coffee places and I still still buy the occasional pack of smokes from my old corner store.  But, when I come in, they all say "Oh, You're visiting?"  I am.  I am visiting.  I am a guest in the place that used to be home.

But, with him, we were both guests.  Neither of us were home.  We were never home for each other.  We were when and where we could meet up, whenever we could get it in.  We were both guests in each other's worlds for as long as I could remember.  This night was no different.  We drank each other in and had a good time.  It was exactly the same as it had been, with a little less sneaking.  The fact that we hadn't slept together in years left less tension and less cause for restraint.  Then, I finished my last drink, said goodbye.  Some mutual friends had come in, as it was a neighborhood spot.  So, I said goodbye to them and I walked to my car.  I got in and I drove, but I didn't drive home.  Neither did he.