A fictionalized comic personal essay.
After a year without contact, my ex, Chris, asked to meet for coffee. I agreed, then spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding what a woman who had moved on would wear.
Apparently, in my imagination, recovery required a very specific jacket.
At the café, he said I looked well. I said he looked different. Neither sentence won an award for originality, but they got us seated.
I had prepared evidence of my excellent life: new interests, pleasant trips, a growing collection of houseplants. Halfway through describing a dance class, I realized I was presenting a progress report to someone who no longer supervised the project.
So I stopped trying to look triumphant and asked why he had wanted to meet.
He missed talking to me. That was what he said; I did not know whether he also wanted to restart the relationship. I asked, rather than constructing a theory from the way he held his coffee.
The conversation was a little awkward and more ordinary than I had expected. I did not need to be dazzling to decide what contact I wanted. A year apart had contained good days, dull days, and several plants that had not survived my new enthusiasm. It was still my life.
We finished our drinks. I went home without delivering the cutting final line I had briefly imagined.
The jacket had done nothing remarkable. Neither had I. It was unexpectedly satisfying not to need the encounter to prove anything.
