Design of a Decade

I haven't heard anything from Reefer Madness in response to my suggestion that we make a plan to get together next weekend. It took him about eight hours to respond to my first email, but it's been three days and he hasn't responded to my second, so I conclude that he isn't going to.

I wish I could say I'm not disappointed by this, but I am. I initially approached him by email, and he could easily have ignored my suggestion that we meet up to discuss what we've both been doing over the last ten years or so. I would have been slightly miffed but unsurprised. I expected him to ignore me. But when he responded by saying that he thought getting together was a good idea, I mistakenly interpreted that to mean that he actually wanted to make a real plan.

I have noticed in the past that some people, when they say that they think getting together would be a good idea, actually mean the exact opposite of that. This is so rude. If someone emails you out of the clear blue after over a decade of radio silence, you have a right to ignore that person. However, if you choose not to ignore her, and you choose instead to gratuitously agree to drink a caffeinated or alcoholic beverage with her and engage her in conversation, you are then obligated by the rules of politeness to cooperate with her efforts to set a meeting place and time. It's just good manners, and if you didn't want to go, you shouldn't have agreed to do it in the first place.

Though I am annoyed, I am not entirely shocked by Reefer Madness's behavior. The last time we were in each other's lives, he disappointed me profoundly, and even though I can, at some level, concede that he has probably matured and changed in the ensuing years, I remained wary. Apparently, I was right to do so. I am trying to smooth over my twinge of disappointment by assuring myself that it is his loss (opinions to the contrary are unwelcome). Back in high school, he obviously, at some point in time, wanted to be in my life, even to be my boyfriend, and he bungled it. In virtually every case, that would have been the end of the situation, but in this case, circumstances brought us both to the same city as adults and is giving him a second chance to get to know me better and see if we could be friends. It's so unlikely that the two of us would have ended up here together that I allowed myself to believe that we were fated to be in each other's lives again at some level. I may have let my sense of romance get the better of me there, and I may have confused fate with coincidence.

Because I feel the need to learn some kind of lesson here, I'm considering the possibility that the result of this situation was not supposed to be that Reefer Madness would have a chance to correct his past mistake but rather that I would have the chance to see that this guy I thought was so fantastic was kind of a douche. In other words, this is teaching me that Reefer Madness is not the one that got away. He's just some guy who seemed pretty awesome to me for a minute in high school who's grown up into a somewhat inconsiderate adult who happens to live in the same city as I do.

It's fitting that Reefer Madness and I would have this run-in now because I've been in a weird state for a few months of wanting to hark back to high school all the time. I wasn't that into high school when I was in it, but I have been driven by the urge over the past few months to resolve some issues or repair some relationships from that period in my life. I had written to a guy that I felt I had been a shitty friend to, and I recently got a very nice letter back from him basically saying that he remembers our friendship fondly and harbors no ill will whatsoever toward me. It felt good to let go of some of the guilt I felt in that situation, and I think it inspired me to try to revisit the situation with Reefer Madness, which had been very painful for me at the time. Unfortunately, it does not look like any soulful conversations over coffee and/or alcohol are in my future, at least not next weekend. This is probably a sign that I should stop looking backward, or at least stop looking backward to such an awkward time in my life, and stop romanticizing guys like Reefer Madness who were not that great to begin with, and try to slouch toward the future.