If you work it out, tell me what you find

One year.

Last summer I thought I’d expire before I reached the year mark, and yet here I am, feeling silly for having known that kind of despair and not being able to articulate it in a less clichéd way. A year ago, I was in the worst place of my life and now I’ve done a complete 180. It’s *weird* to think about how much changed in such a relatively short period of time (I say that with tongue planted firmly in cheek, since for months I felt like every day lasted about a year). Time crawled like slothful bather turning over in the summer sun, and then it sped up imperceptibly, so today came almost without my realizing it.

Glenn and I talked on Saturday. We hadn’t spoken since early March and I really didn’t want to talk to him, but my aunt was up in Vermont and she wanted to know if I needed her to pick up anything from Glenn’s family’s house there. Somewhere in that house is a box of my winter things—nice fleece hats, thick gloves, a scarf that belonged to my late uncle and another one that was knit for me by a friend’s mother. Glenn’s mother promised to mail the box to me last fall, but she never did and I haven’t been able to just let the box go because I’m sentimentally attached to what’s inside. So I called.

How did I almost marry him?

That’s the only question I still ask myself. Judging from our conversation, we’re 3,000 miles apart in much more than just geography. I have moved on. In a lot of ways, he still seems stuck, though he’s finally moving out of the apartment we shared in LA. Oh, the symbolism. He’s single and proud of that fact, but proud in that, “The happier I try to be as a single guy, the more likely I am to meet someone” kind of way. He talks to me like I’m still one of his best friends, as if we talk every day, as if I want to know the details of his life. He didn’t notice that I answered his (few) questions with huge generalities because my life is none of his business. I know he wants me to be happy, but I don’t want him to know anything other than the fact that I am.

At no point did he say anything that led me to believe he ever valued or appreciated me, or doubted the choices he made. He did say that he spent Memorial Day weekend remembering what we went through last year, and he knew it was the year anniversary of my decision to call it off. When I hung up the phone, I felt like I’d been talking to someone on another planet and, though I was upset, I was so glad that I wasn’t on that planet with him.

I don’t even know what to write about the whole thing anymore because it’s all been said. Worked through. Processed. Finished.

In the infinitely wise words of Austin Powers, “That train has sailed.”