I made a boo-boo. Well, not so much a boo-boo as a huge fucking error of judgement. I text The Director. After 16 days of zero communication, I was doing so well. And then came the relapse.

It came thinly veiled as a favour. He told he wanted a specific car while we were dating so I asked a man who would know about such things if he could keep an eye out. The man who knows about such things sent me a text which I should pass on to The Director. For about fifteen minutes I thought about it. I thought about emailing the info to him. Or maybe just calling him and leaving a voicemail. (There’s a code you can enter which makes the call go straight to voicemail in case you didn’t want to talk to the person on the receiving end…) I didn’t though. I text him. And then he text back. And then I realised the mistake I’d made. There’s a reason you cut all ties – the advice I gave in the book. The advice I said I was going to follow. It’s to avoid relapsing just like this.

I don’t know if I was expecting a reply. We hadn’t left things on the best of terms. But he did reply. It was a nice reply. He hoped I was well, was I alright, it was nice to hear from me… When I asked how he was, he avoided the question. Being a crazy girl and all, I read too much into it and my head went into overdrive. I didn’t know if I was meant to respond. So I didn’t. I archived the messages instead. I’ll deal with them later.

I didn’t take my own advice. What a dumbass. All those rules I said I was going to live by, all the advice I gave in the breakup book… I ignored it all. I didn’t delete his number. I didn’t block him. Instead, I archived the messages to ‘deal with them later’. Which, of course, I didn’t do. And you know what? I’ve proved my own point. If you don’t delete his number, you WILL text him. You’ll find some pathetic little excuse to shoot him a cheeky message just so he knows you’re still alive in the hope it jolts him into realising you WERE the best thing since sliced bread.

Pointless fucking exercise. 

All the reasons I told you about, all the ways I said it would make you feel in the book… That’s how it made me feel. I’d spent two weeks weaning myself away from his WhatsApp chat thread and because of that one lousy message, I now found myself glued to it again. Why hadn’t he text back? Was he going to text back? Did he want to talk to me? What would he say? Do I want to talk to him? What should I say?

I wondered if I’d given up too soon. I did really like this guy. He was everything I said I wanted. On paper, he was perfect. In real life though, he was just a little shit. A little shit I would have fallen in love with, and probably already was a little bit, and I would probably have fallen out of love with too. There’s no way we would have lasted the distance.

So why did I text him? More than that, why has the conversation continued somewhat?

Fast forward four or five days where we didn’t talk and I returned back to normal life and boom, there it was. I woke up to another text message from him. This time it was saying thanks for helping him find a car. He hadn’t bought the one I told him about but it did lead to him finding one anyway. He expressed his excitement about it. I told him to send me photos once he’d picked it up.

Why? Why did I do that? It’s going to be another four or five days of not talking and I’ll get back to normal again and then he’ll send me the photos of the car just as I requested. Right back to square one.

So why am I doing it? 

I miss him. That’s the easy answer. I was ‘into’ him. I wanted him. I thought he wanted me. I think he actually did but piss-poor communication got in the way. I played it too cool and he didn’t know how to play it at all. It’s a shame really but that’s how it went and you can’t undo what has been done, can you?

So why does it still bug me? After all this time and the fact I was doing so well, how does a text message bring back feelings I wasn’t even sure I had. Feelings I’m pretty sure I was having too soon. Feelings I’m pretty sure I never actually showed him and if I had, we probably wouldn’t have gone the way we did. But whatever. Life is too short for what-if’s…

Says the girl preparing for a date with yet another ex-boyfriend tomorrow. Man, do I like to make my own life complicated.

Total relapse.