Through a random, round-about way, I found an old college friend of mine on myspace. She had apparently sent me a friend request yesterday and I had approved it, even though I didn't log onto myspace yesterday. It's all good because she is a friend that I miss often and had lost touch with. And yet, there she was, with her college nickname that she insisted we all stop using (despite the difficulty we all have of calling her anything else). From her profile I found friend after friend after friend from college...a whole slew of my old Cornell friends right there on myspace. That finally led me to an ex. He really isn't "an" ex; he's "the" ex from those days. We were together for 5 years, lived with each other for most of that time, went through a lot of happy experiences, growth, crap, etc. 

All I have left are the memories, and every so often, the question in the back of my head that goes something along the lines of, "What the f*#k was I thinking?" The first two years with him in my life were two of the best; the last three were three of the worst. After almost 5 years, under the pretense that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, I left a good job that I loved in a city that I felt at home in for an equally good job that I liked in the middle of BFE Iowa. It was 30 minutes to anything, and at least an hour to anything good. I watched everything fall apart around us for the first two months we were there until I came home one day from work and all of his stuff (and some of mine) was packed up and gone. Just like that. 

He freaked out for a month and traveled until he came back, sort of, and wanted me to hang around while he tried to figure things out. Figuring things out meant all kinds of things that I had already gone through years before meeting him and really wasn't interested in waiting for him to go through. I found out through 3rd parties that he had been sleeping with anything that moved whenever he was away at ren faires for the weekends, and had even stalked an acquaintance of mine and a friend of his. Some of our mutual friends were under the impression that I had found out about all of this and kicked him out. Others thought that he had left me because I beat him on a regular basis and he was finally getting away from the abuse. I lost some of my college friends over this one. As if I could beat the crap out of a great big solid 6'4" Scots-Irish man. I lost in tickle fights. There's no way I could have ever taken him physically in any kind of brawl. But people believed him. 

So as I sat just a few minutes ago looking at his profile picture, I noted how much and how little he still looks like the guy I used to be so close to. I also realized how unattractive he is to me now. Funny, that. It's in the past. I've dealt with the pain and the wounds. I've even picked myself up a couple of times since then. I'm in a much better place in my life now. I can deal with a lot more than I could back then. I've learned an amazing amount of stuff which I didn't even realize back then I that I didn't know. I was stung for a moment as all of the memories came flooding back, and then I realized how enriched I became from it all. I feel weird. I feel lonely. I know that it will pass and in a matter of hours I will be meeting a group of friends to go see Flogging Molly, not to mention those that I will see later on this week and this weekend. I know I'm in a much better place emotionally now than I ever was then. The next time I drink, I think I'm going to raise my glass and make a toast to my friends here. I don't know what I would do without them.