An Ex-Boyfriend Confessional.

I can’t believe I loved him.

Charm, I know now, is an understatement. He grasped life like it was one big bowl for him and I had NEVER. Ever. Done that.

His European eyebrows. The ka-blam when we kissed. Dancing in his kitchen. The fact that he listened to the radio station of all Christmas music during the holidays.

The fact that he cried on our first date that lasted 14 hours.

These are most of the things that blinded me to the bad. The texts from girls I didn’t know. Pictures saved on his phone. The fact that I WOULD go through his phone.

He never made plans with me ahead of time. A trip halfway through Montana to see Bess get married was finalized the day before. But I’d planned to go without him.

I was used to being disappointed.

Blinded by the fact that his time with his kids is sacred. That his ex-wife cheated on him.

But the fact is, he cheated on her first. He’s first rate Spokane player scum and I…the girl getting divorced…didn’t see it. I just FELT hope.

All I wanted was grace.

And the fact is, I felt that grace 85% of the year we were together.

In bars, if women tried to hit on him in front of me, he would introduce them to his best friend. Dance only with me in front of the band. This fodder made for a good New Year’s Eve memory.

The way he would put me on his arm. I was nothing to be ashamed of. How could I not be important to him? I felt important. Even if it was momentary.

A few weeks after we dumped me for another woman he cried, like he did on that first date, about what a bad guy he was. Confessed to being the one who cheated on his ex-wife and then she divorced him. Said he was sorry. Didn’t want a life without me in it, somehow. But I’d already been too broken. Couldn’t look him in the eye, for what reason, I don’t know. Perhaps, I was afraid I would laugh. Laugh at the pain he had caused me and to now be seeing him in pain. Or maybe I would have cried, too. I couldn’t trust myself to look at him. Too risky. But when he asked me to look at him, I did.

A few days ago, I came out of my apartment to see his car parked by mine. A man was telling him to stay away from his girlfriend. To never come around here again, if he knew what was good for him. I saw the stoic Section V* that I knew, learning on his car, eyes vacant, slowly smoking at the ground.

Turns out the women he had dumped me for lived just two floors above me. Said she had met him in a bar. The guy who had told Section V to leave was her boyfriend. She said she had never been Section V’s girlfriend and that he had been texting her incessantly. She hadn’t heard from him for about a week and now, he’d shown up at her door.

It was then, I knew. The man that I knew didn’t really exist. He was a selfish liar.

How had I not seen this? Did he get worse in the past few months? Could I have been so blind?

I feel now that I made Section V into a character of my own life. He danced, caressed and performed in my poems but in life, he was just really out to get what he could from a broken woman trying to get over the car wreak for her marriage. He could bandage me poorly and I was grateful. Grateful for any sort of salve I could get.

I hope someday I find I still have enough belief in grace, hope and yes, love, that I can put all my proverbial eggs in one basket.

Even if it’s just my own basket, it’ll all have been worth it.

*Name for Ex-Bf. Also refers to the fact that Section V of my thesis contains only poems about this relationship.