She married him

Huh.

Every so often (at ever length­en­ing inter­vals, I am glad to report) I get the incli­na­tion to Google the name of my first girl­friend. This morn­ing was one of those occa­sions, and I had the bright idea to try her first name in com­bi­na­tion with the last name of the guy she dumped me for. And there they were: Mr and Mrs, him and her, on a list of donors to the Catholic high school from which he grad­u­at­ed. At last, an answer to that lit­tle question.

Well, that’s nice. Just as I am glad to con­tin­ue to believe that my major life choic­es have been for the best, that I am indeed fol­low­ing the path that I am tru­ly called to tread, so, too, I take real and sin­cere com­fort in the knowl­edge — reli­able or not — that once-beloved oth­ers are mak­ing the right deci­sions in their lives. She thought that they — she and he — were far more com­pat­i­ble than we — she and I — could ever be. I believe she was right.

Of course I cer­tain­ly did­n’t agree with her at the time. But after long, anguished months filled with pathet­ic attempts to “win her back” I came to grudg­ing­ly respect her deci­sion and out of neces­si­ty tried to move on with my own life, a life with­out her.

So I’ve got Jude in my head today. I remem­ber that back in that dis­mal Spring of 2000 there would be days where I would set the cd play­er to “Repeat” and lis­ten to “I Do” over and over and over and over, for hours at a stretch, strug­gling to inter­nalise the emo­tion­al state that the per­sona of the song has achieved:

But there’s just one more dream
that I have left for you
I hope you’re smil­ing when
he turns around and says “I do“
I do