August Left

Yesterday morning my ex approached me in the parking lot at work. I say approached, but she pulled up in her car and parked behind my truck. I just kind of sat there frozen, not knowing what she was doing or why. She got out and stood outside her car just looking at me sat there, waiting to see what she was going to do.

She called out me asking “Do you want to have this conversation?, I’m done walking on eggshells.” She said she had been wondering if I was going to try to talk to her to bring everything up again. She said it all felt abrupt and angry and now she felt ready to have more of a conversation if that’s something I wanted to do.

I told her that I didn’t think that there was a conversation to be had anymore, and that there was no scenario in which it was safe for me to talk to her ever again since she got law enforcement involved. I was reluctant. She said that I scared her saying that showing up her place that night was inappropriate and frightening.

She wanted me to verbally acknowledge that I was wrong. I asked her if she truly believed it was inappropriate for me to show up at her house. I told her I felt the only reason she was upset is because I caught her in a lie. She asserted that I was still in the wrong and she didn’t owe me any truth about who she was seeing.

I asked her why she wasn’t honest like we talked about. How we had agreed to just let one another know when we were starting to see other people so that there were no surprises, no guessing, so it didn’t lead to an abrupt realization that the other person was moved on. I was just asking for respect.

She then told me that she felt she didn’t agree completely to those terms, as she didn’t believe it was any of my business as she didn’t want to know mine. She then tried to tell me that she thought I was only asking that for concerns for my own sexual health, like if she slept with someone else while also sleeping with me.

She reduced our interactions over the past couple months down to “just friends” and said that we had been broken up since July. I said that the level of involvement we had been engaging in over the past couple months did not communicate we were “just friends”.

I gave examples: like buying a Christmas tree and decorating it together where she asked for a photo of just the two of us at the tree farm, the night were sexually intimate at my apartment before she drove me to the airport the next morning when I went home for the holidays, the days I had come over to spend time with her new dog and how I was on the phone with her the whole day she was adopting it, the daily texting and phone calls, the texts I had the night prior to the confrontation where she said she still had feelings for me, the video call the afternoon that day and many more examples I didn’t say that I’ve talked about in this blog.

She then admitted that she acknowledges all of those moments. But said that she was just trying to maintain something that she considered a friendship with me, because the one thing she couldn’t accept was the alternative. The one where we were no longer friends. She said no matter what we did, it was going to seem intimate because of our past, but said that was something she purposely ignored.

I told her she sent very mixed signals to then just decide conveniently that it was none of my business that she was seeing something while still talking to me. I said that all I asked for was transparency, because even up until the afternoon before I found out, she was communicating like we always did, and was still trying to spend time with me.

She kept trying to frame the conversation around how she was opening a dialogue trying to be honest and to allow me to ask her questions if I was concerned for my sexual health, and to ease her mind around being worried or scared about the situation. I told her it didn’t make sense that in one instance she tells me it’s none of my business and now she is saying she wants to be honest about things.

She kept trying to get me to acknowledge that I scared her and I was wrong for driving over to her house. I felt she was trying to flip everything back on me and told her that she was the one that got caught lying to me and that’s what this is really about. She then reiterated that she didn’t do anything wrong because she is single and doesn’t owe me anything.

When I again asked her why she continued to stay emotionally available to me and kept allowing us to spend time together, her only response was “because those were things I thought we mutually enjoyed”. I cut her off and said those aren’t things that just friends do. She deflected and then said “Maybe I was just looking for closure by you acknowledging you scared the shit out of me, I don’t think I’m going to get that”.

I apologized to her. She then went on to say that yes, she did want to have closure to tell me that I scared her, and yes she should have told me that she was seeing other people. But doubled down saying she didn’t feel like she needed to share that information with me. She said that she never asked if I was seeing other people because she didn’t want me to have that information back. Then said that there was no out for her, that she was going to hurt me regardless if she told me or not.

I tried to tell her that one of those options was significantly better than the other. And said I gave her plenty of opportunities to be transparent so everyone avoided feeling dumb, stupid, or confused. She told me I would have felt all of those things regardless no matter if she told me or not.

She would not hold responsibility that it was wrong in the ways she continued to see me and tell me she had feelings for me. She said we were on different pages. She minimized all of our interactions and labeled us as “just friends” and only our past relationship made it feel like anything more. She told me that I could have just saw her with this new person that night and left but it was wrong of me to do anything more than that. I couldn’t believe she said that.

The conversation ended with her saying that she was worried that I was going to do something else, like show up at her house or confront her, and that the reason she came up to talk to me was to clarify that nothing more would happen. I told her that nothing ever will. I’m gone, especially after that phone call from the police.

In the end I know she just wanted the unknown to stop scaring her. The whole conversation was a self soothing check-in. I didn’t get any closer to closure and I never will. I think she doesn’t truly feel like she did anything wrong. That she was single and her continued interaction with me over the last 6 months meant nothing in the way of intimacy.

It felt like a bad emotional reset talking to her. I went back and forth afterwords asking myself if I even should have talked to her. I should have just left, because however she felt standing there, and how she feels now is not my responsibility.

Thanks for reading.