For years they were good friends.
Then they had a fatal disagreement.
He’d so often made her leap over so many unnecessarily high hurdles, but she grew, felt her jumping had improved and that his hurdles—which were more like concrete walls—had lost their former sense of intimidation, thus generating in her the desire for higher hurdles, located on different fields.
She was an intellectual who desired an active, vivid inner life, but with him she found herself yearning and longing and pining and, worst of all, waiting.
There was a time—though she would never openly admit it—that she’d seriously been in love with him, but those feelings, with time and inspired orgasms brought on by her own hand, had passed.
He reliably stranded her on the shores of ambivalence: that bastard.
So, at her behest, a period of silence between them ensued, though, when one of her new paramours failed to stick around, she found it hard not to turn back to him and get the attention she knew she could receive, meaning that no matter the fact that she omitted two or three things from him they never resisted ever completely falling out-of-touch.
Every woman needs a young man in her rolodex; the inexhaustible suffering keeps her feeling youthful; and they were in fact content to be in each other’s company now and then, having a history together and all, like enemies who’ve become friends but, for a myriad of reasons, never lovers.
Sometimes she was able to rise above the surface long enough to view all this from the distance, like an athlete standing at the back of the top row of a stadium. Was all that work worth the supposed benefits, she wondered. She wished to retire from the sport altogether. She had to stop putting herself in a position to be yet another thing he dropped the ball on—royally fucked-up. He would in some way disappoint her soon enough; the word sorry like a lightbulb, losing its power with every use. One day she’d turned the light on in her heart and the fuse would go out. But why wait?
She smashed the bulb and was left in the dark and thus acquired night vision, now blinded from all those images of him, finally free of this one hang-up.