The Temporal Existence Unremembered

Every so often, I drive past one of my ex-boyfriend’s house here in town. Much has changed since we dated, namely my hairstyle and my car. Sometimes I wonder if he’d recognize me if he saw me now.

Then I remember a night, shortly before finals in my college sophomore fall, I happened to see him at a gas station near my college. We exchanged stories of how he was taking dual enrollment classes (he was two years behind me) and I was getting ready to transfer to UCF. Those pleasantries.

He then mentioned how his older brother and his wife had a son. “Another one?” I asked. No, my ex was talking about his brother’s first son (though they’d since had a second).

The one he and I, along with his parents, drove seven and a half hours for so the family would be there for the birth. (Why I was included to this day eludes me.)

I reminded him of this. Turns out he completely forgot I was there.

If he didn’t remember me at such an important point in his life, I seriously doubt he’d remember me now.

In the Now

I feel like I’ve wasted this summer, which could be interpreted a number of ways. On the one hand, I did an obscene amount of “chillaxing” (which my students inform me is actually not in the lexicon anymore and thus reaffirming how blatantly out of touch I am with them). But on the other, I feel like I didn’t accomplish a lot. There’s some argument that I coulda/woulda/shoulda done more with this free time until the grad school textbooks hit the fan, but then I get queasy at the idea of all those books that I paid for being shredded. Money wasted. Almost like a summer wasted, amirite?

But I think I accomplished enough to make someone happy. (Not me; I’m never happy with anything I do.) The sum total of my accomplishments can be summed up with this: “This is where I am right now.”