Worse Than Strangers
By Isabella Broccolo
Photo by Isabella Broccolo
When I was 17, I fell in love hard and I got dumped hard. My ex and I didn’t date that long, but the end to our relationship was certainly not amicable. There were attempts to patch things up in the following years, but for some reason or another, we were never able to get back onto the same page. Eventually, we just stopped talking and began avoiding eye contact. I wandered around the city and school we both shared, constantly on guard and wondering where we might see each other next.
We managed to dodge each other outside of campus for years. Until the day I decided to take my boyfriend to my favorite coffee shop. I ordered my coffee and then walked over to where my boyfriend was sitting. As I pulled my laptop from my bag and placed it on the counter, I heard him say “Is that your ex?” and gesture to a guy walking through the shop. I glanced up, hoping my boyfriend was mistaken. But he wasn’t. There he was, my ex boyfriend.
Our eyes met and he quickly looked away, but not before I saw a flash of panic contort his face. I turned back to my laptop and opened it, but my mind was far from my school work. I kept trying to steal glances at my ex. From the position of his body and the body language of the person opposite him, it was easy for me to deduce that they were on a date. The absurdity of the situation made me giddy and temporarily high.
God it’s so weird to run into your ex, especially when you’re sitting at the same coffee shop, trapped. When you’re forced to confront each other in a distant, silent way. What do you do? Try to play it cool? Flip your hair effortlessly over your shoulder and try to make them jealous? Smile at them? Say hi?
Well I’ll tell you what I did. I laughed and spit coffee on my laptop screen. Not a lot, but enough to make me look ceremoniously uncool.
As I sat there, wiping down my computer, I tried to gather my thoughts. Why did this particular situation make me feel so weird? Was it because my ex-boyfriend and new boyfriend were in the same room? No. Was it because I still had feelings for my ex? No. As I flicked away the last, small drop of coffee from my keyboard, I realized: I felt weird because the guy who had helped me buy the computer I was currently cleaning was sitting 5 feet away from me and we weren’t going to talk to each other. I sat back in my hard metal chair. As the feelings of anxiety and adrenaline faded, a dull pain set in. A longing kind of pain. A longing that wasn’t “I wish things hadn’t ended” but more of a “I wish they hadn’t ended like this.”
One of the hardest parts of a breakup, which I feel isn’t talked about enough, is how hard it is to feel yourself seemingly slide backwards, as you and someone you once loved proceed but regress. Simultaneously, reverting back to strangers but forced to continue living with the fingerprints from where the other person touched your life. It’s so weird to be strangers again. Although really, we can never be strangers. Strangers don’t know each other. Strangers cause each other no pain, no suffocating silence, because there are no memories, no shared experiences, no connection. So really, we’re not strangers.
We’re worse than strangers.
I guess some loose ends are never tied up. Maybe it’s better to leave them frayed.
