memory lane

October was a freaky month.
>my mother was on suicide watch, i didn’t see the shrink, i got promoted, my brother racked up a few bills, paul started a new job at AOL, Wednesday got bigger, an uncle died, I went to a spa, kethcame to visit.
That is stuff I can remember.
i should have been recording this, i should have been writing this done, but i wasn’t and i didn’t. but it’s a free country and i was getting sick of people emailing me and calling me asking me if i were alive or not, and i am; so i finally sat down and finished this damn thing.
one note on the design, if it looks even vaguely familiar, it was one of the first “professional” designs i had done by a friend of mine nearly two years ago. i realized it looked much better than anything i had done recently and so i modified it and threw it up. tada. aren’t you glad you waited? i also gave up on blogger. it was pissing me off.
rituals
every Friday night, paul, moe and I head to Logan’s Steakhouse. It has become such a ritual, that we even have our regular waitress, whom knows all of our orders and doesn’t bother bringing us menus anymore. We adore her so much, for her birthday, we tipped her 150 bucks. This is how loyal we are to this joint.
Moe ditched us last night and went out to see Circque de Sole with another friend so we got a few other people to come hang out with us. We should have known it was bad when our waitress wasn’t working, the soccer moms had taken over and the wait was nearly 1.5 hours to grab a table. Since we were all planning on seeing Bedazzled after dinner, we decided to take a stroll over to Barnes and Noble to look around.
I knew Moe should have come with us.
As soon as we walked in, I did a double take to to my right and saw someone who looked suspiciously like my ex, Alan. If you would have told me that nearly 10 years after we had started dating I would be having panic attacks about seeing him still and convincing myself he was still the one, in every day reality i would be laughing in your face. When the truth hits the fan, I was hiding behind the audio books watching this guy like some stalker, peering over the racks looking to see if it was him or not.
What was it that caught me off guard? The way he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.
I’m not kidding.
I wish it were something that would have been more pronounced, like actually looking like him or something else other than flipping this wallet out of his back pocket, but it wasn’t.
That disturbs me.
What is even more disturbing is that I’ve been having slideshows in my head of previous exes in the last decade since I met Alan before this encounter last night. I had a dream last weekend that one of my best friends Josh ended up with me and cheated on me with some girl I knew back from when I was working in San Fran. I’ve been having quick flashes at the weirdest times of guys I’ve dated seriously (and not so seriously) of smells, instances, little things that are reminders of my time with them.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that after all this time I would be over Alan? Why does he keep holding a strange hold over my life.
I’ve been down this route before. i talked about it a couple of years ago when I had thought i had seen Alan at a restaurant Michael and i had gone to.
so realistically, the chances of Alan moving from mi->ca->va the same times i have are very slim to none.
i know this.
but that doesn’t stop the heart beating wildly and the thoughts going crazy in my head when i thought i saw him.
I’m going home to Michigan in December to see my mom and touch base. paul thinks I’m crazy for feeling like i do because this is the here and now — but the really scary part is, i used to think the last 10 years of my life meant something — and i wonder if all this time if i kept myself in some sort of blanket and protection about Alan and i’s breakup — if it was all just one delusion set upon by me?
wouldn’t that be a fucking bitch.
x0x0x0x
lisa