Ten Years After

When the one who got away comes back.

Photo courtesy of the author.

I am about to make a bad choice.

He tracked me down ten years after his Irish exit from the relationship. By the way, Ten Years After is the name of a band I loved that was popular the year I graduated high school, which is the year he was born. When we met, 48 to 31 was one irresistible thing; 68 to 51 is oh-so-humbling-ly another. I was older then. I’m an oldster now.

What boosts this bad choice beyond many others I’ve made over the years is, I know it’s bad and I’m doing it anyway. Not doing it will make me a senior citizen in my soul as well as in my mirror. Welcome to my tiny, futile resistance.

The plan is to meet at our former haunt, a dark bar with a good jukebox and all that nice, disinhibiting alcohol. Two weeks gives me enough time to become obsessed with the possibility of being desired. At my age, being desired is sadly not in a dead heat, so to speak, with having desire, which in a funny little post-menopausal irony, I still do. But the odds of some someone wanting me the way I want them seem, from the safety of my cozy-bunker life, astronomical. So much work, so much risk, too much exposure. Yet, when he texts “Drinks?” after a decade of no contact, work and risk and exposure— fear— disintegrate. After all, we have a Venn diagram already in place. I reply and delete, reply and delete and settle on “Yes,” thinking it communicates the ineffable, inevitable us without revealing my ten years ruminating and yearning.

During the two-week countdown to our reunion, I play our songs, replay our sexy interludes, and review all my clothes in an effort to reboot younger me. The bed is piled high with garments too frumpy, too try-hard, too vivid, too dull. I assess myself in the ancient mirror in the bedroom, grateful for the blur: my changed face, the body I inhabit, my silvery hair. I google ”fast facelift” and my social media feeds (such an unpleasant noun, feeds) tease rejuvenation relentlessly. The women I’m supposed to want to look like look sharp as blades with glass skin and slashes beneath their cheekbones. I don’t know. I remind myself the bar will be dark. Still, I spend a couple hundred dollars on a facial and a couple hundred dollars on a cashmere sweater that, in the very near future, I will send to Housing Works for its crime of association with our reunion.

He tracked me down ten years after his Irish exit from the relationship. By the way, Ten Years After is the name of a band I loved that was popular the year I graduated high school, which is the year he was born.

It’s a ten-block, ten-year passage back to the joint where we met. I walk in. I don’t see him. I go further in. There he is. We can’t suppress smiles. I say hey. He says hey. His face has changed but his voice is the same. He seems smaller, like when you go back to the old neighborhood. We shake our heads at the years, the years. We catch up, but our current separate circumstances are beside the point.

I say What are we doing here.

He says I’m sorry for how it went, can you forgive me.

This is not what I expected, not the shrug or sheepish grin of yore. I try to recall one time in my life when this man or any man I’ve loved has reflected and apologized and asked for forgiveness. I don’t mean for a raised voice or a forgotten occasion or a stubborn stance. I mean for the whole thing. I can’t! I have to hold my own hand to not touch him.

The next time the bar is crowded. We move closer, move in on each other, move to my place. I hear my dead mother’s voice: Keep both feet on the floor. I do, but it’s prelude, an overture, a tease. I feel silly, like I’m playing a girl’s game. But it works, he’s with it, and for a moment that defines my days. For those days I let myself believe it’s fate and not just middle-aged curiosity on his part and last-grasp, last-gasp romance on mine. Not just his need to revisit his younger self, and my need to re-litigate old grievances, which even I’m sick of. Instead, I reframe it as righteous empowerment, just like my social media women “friends” exhort: I’m open, I deserve this, I have no fucks left to give. I’m gonna go for it! Who knows! I read NYT Weddings every week, love lost and found, it happens! I dwell in possibility and that’s thrilling until it isn’t because for one thing, I don’t have many more facials and cashmere sweaters in my budget. For another, I try but I can’t fool myself the way I used to. He’s not mine.

Stephanie Gangi recently.

After the second date, I notice a physical pull on the left side of my chest, near my heart. It flashes like a flare on the days I don’t hear from him. The pain reminds me of how it felt with him years ago when I was worried about love, definitions of love, levels of love. I let him back in so often that I was too embarrassed to bitch to my friends and too proud to admit his return to my daughters. Maybe an apology isn’t enough? Maybe forgiveness isn’t my responsibility. I walk with a podcast and laugh out loud when I hear Fran Leibowitz say, I don’t forgive people. And I am like an incredible grudge holder. I get it.

There is so much to actively ignore in order to get this situationship into bed. I try, I do. I buy candles and lingerie to muster up a sex-for-fun mindset, something I used to be darned good at. I negotiate with myself over how much of a happy ending I’m willing to not have because I’m modern and damn it, a happy ending is whatever I say it is. I actually list He’s not lying this time in the Pro column. I’m buzzing with a non-stop internal monologue and also, dialogue we have, where I devise conversational prompts for him to give answers I’m seeking but he’s not offering. I pretend to myself that it’s okay that the bar is so low.

When we met, 48 to 31 was one irresistible thing; 68 to 51 is oh-so-humbling-ly another. I was older then. I’m an oldster now.

Still, the promise, monthly now, of secret meetings and street corner kisses hums underneath. I’m blind to my own delusional attempts to dress up the past and try on a future with him. Again. Which is laughable. How deceptive, desire! It’s both astonishing and unnerving to admit: I used to live for it and am tempted to do so again.

But in a dreary sign of maturity, the thrill becomes exhausting and disappointing. I’ve gotten used to disappointment as I’ve gotten older, and I am not—repeat, not—up for more. Mostly because I see it, like, on my face. Bossy experience and pushy wisdom and self-preserving vanity shriek, an advanced disappointment-warning system. I discover, finally, my aversion to inflicting pain on myself. Also, I’m running out of expensive skin cream and bored scrolling for surprising underwear.

Order Stephanie Gangi’s most recent novel—which I LOVED. - Sari

I’m not who I was when I once loved him. I’ve had to humble myself when fate pointed in my direction and the gods of irony had their fun at my expense. I have had to make room inside for loss and grief in every category. I’ve been through the five stages so many times, I could be grief’s event planner. With age—he’s now older than I was when we met—he has not expanded in that way. It’s something I realize a short hour into the first reunion. He’s so much the same that I feel phony sitting across from him. I can’t properly arrange my face, which probably cancels out the facial. He’s so much the same that I don’t trust the apology. Forgiveness feels like work, risk, exposure. This wrong face feels so obvious to me, but he doesn’t notice. He doesn’t know me anymore.

Ten years after, I choose to give up years of yearning for him just as yearning is about to be satisfied. That’s the choice. The choice is only bad because it’s hard. The third time, I walk in. I don’t see him. I go further in. There I am.

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Previously Stephanie Gangi took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.