The Upper Hand.

It’s 4:30am, I’m wide awake, I have a dress rehearsal in the morning, and I am terribly, terribly thirsty. I’ve guzzled glass after glass of water, and nothing will sate this thirst. I don’t understand why, because I didn’t eat anything particularly high in sodium during the day, and I make it a point to stay reasonably hydrated at all times. And yet, here I am.

Christ. I mean, when I stay up all night drowning myself in a glass, I at least expect the glass to be filled with liquor. Plain water? Not so much with the fun.So, I called. (See the last entry for details.) It wasn’t as bad as I had feared.

There’s a connection between us; that’s undeniable. We wouldn’t have been able to maintain this quasi-relationship for seven years if there wasn’t. Even after twenty-two months of not speaking, we picked up right where we left off.

He sounds older. He’s finally grown up, I think. (And it’s a little bit ridiculous that it took this long, because he’s five years older than me. He’s supposed to be waiting for me to grow up.) He sounds mature and responsible, and he didn’t start with any of the mind-games or guilt-trips that have plagued our breakups in the past. In fact, he came right out and admitted, before I had barely said a word, that it was his fault we drifted apart. And it was his fault — so when he said that, all of the residual anger I’d been holding onto melted away.

He’s missed me, he says. He’s wanted to call me for a long time, but he didn’t know where to find me. He figured that I had moved here because I had been starting to make plans around the time we were breaking up. He says that he looks for me on the street all the time. We laughed when we realized that we only live two blocks away from each other. We laughed a lot, actually. More than I had expected we would.

He wants to see me. He asked me if I wanted to meet for coffee. I reminded him that neither of us drink coffee. We laughed some more.

I knew him vaguely as far back as the age of ten — I wonder, if I had gone back and whispered in to my little ear that this older boy would be my first love and that I would never be able to escape from him, if I would have believed it?

Without all that anger in the way, I realized something: I miss him. I want him to be my friend. I want him in my life. I’m not in love with him anymore, but, yes, I do love him. How could I not? He’s a good person, even if he is a little weird. He has a good heart. I’m having dinner with him next week.

That’s the good part.

The bad part?

He’s still in love with me.

No, he is. I could hear it in his voice. He was overwhelmed with emotion, talking to me. We need to have a good long conversation, because I know what he’s thinking. I know what he wants this to be, and I know that it just can’t be that.

He said last night that he was always frustrated because we never had any sort of closure. I need to give him, no, us that closure, and make it clear to him that the sort of relationship we’ve had in the past is truly over, and that I want to start now with something new.

I know what I want. I have the upper hand.

I can do this.