I am a porcupine.

On Saturday I ran into A in the subway. I was struck by how ordinary our encounter seemed. I was walking down the length of the train and there he was.  I saw him first. I nudged his foot with mine and sat next to him.  After we said goodbye, he called. And then he called again, he emailed, he called, he emailed. It started to piss me off. Last night, I answered. I couldn’t stand his questions about what I’d been doing, I didn’t want to tell him anything. I started off slow and cold. Then something broke and I wanted to tell him everything.

Two objects cannot occupy the same space – this is what I have realized. If A is around, there is no hope for anything with anyone because there is no one I like talking to more, no one who annoys me so much, no one I love, no one who loves me more than he.  No one else I almost had a baby with. That’s a lot to say – even I can see that. None of it is enough to change anything. And there’s no one who replaced me faster than he did. That last sentence is a hypocritical statement. I tried the same thing – I tried to replace him.  The only difference is that he succeeded in finding someone else and I did not.

All these words and those men I fucked are just different ways of missing A. If only we had been brave enough.

I think this time we are going to do it – this is the parting that will stick. I could keep telling myself I’m getting over it and that might even be true. Some days, it is.  As long as he’s around, I’ll keep hoping (though I will probably never admit it to anyone) that he will wake up one day and realize that he loves me enough to take a leap of faith. Intellectually, it’s pretty obvious to me that that’s not going to happen.

As we talked, four and a half hours according to my phone, I realized that we are still very much attached.  It felt good – banter and tenderness. Then I felt demoralized and rather desperate.  That’s when I told him he had to leave me alone. “Help me get over this,” I said.

This is hard for me to write.  It’s an admission of failure in many ways. But it’s my fetus anniversary again.  11 months.  March might find me in worse shape. It took an hour to start typing – I will be embarrassed about this as soon as I post it.

How is it that I can write all this about A and then think about M and hope - naively, sincerely, foolishly - that something will happen between us? Why am I not smarter than this?