I have an Ex with Benefits. This is me trying to keep the good parts of our relationship going–the fun that we had together, the passion, the ease that comes from knowing someone so well–while avoiding the bad. I mean, just because I don’t want to buy the book, doesn’t mean I can’t still check it out from the library from time to time.

It’s not the only time I’ve tried this. This picking through the ruins of a relationship trying to salvage the still intact pieces and cobble them together into some rough shaped yard art. I think it comes from my fear of loss–loss that is already piled upon a hill of loss with more loss boxed away in the basement that I’m still sorting through. Loss that triggers the already heavy load of loss I’m still schlepping around after years of work trying to clear it out.

In the soundtrack of my life, that litany of loss was the steady beat of the bass drum.

It also comes from a resourcefulness that only a child raised within the pain-stained walls of trauma can cultivate. Maybe I’m a little too resourceful.

My childhood certainly infused me with a kind of Take What You Can Get desperation. How could it not? It was all but spoken, steadily demonstrated by the refrain of: boxes of Kraft macaroni-n-cheese you could push a chair up to the stove to make, a “Come talk to me while I get ready for work” distracted level of attention to whatever problem I was facing, and my eyes searching the crowd for a familial face from the middle school concert stage while I wetted the reed of my mouthpiece. While my fellow musicians waved back to the enthusiastic relatives who were proud just to see them sitting there it seemed, because we’d not even played a single note yet, I pretended not to notice as I shuffled my sheet music and feigned inspection of my instrument’s keys. She’d come, at some point, but always long after when I really needed her. Even a nine-year-old clarinet player gets nervous.

Unconditional love was my Atocha and I was Mel Fisher. (I’m writing this in Key West–Google the reference; it’s fascinating).

My cobble project was working. I had the best of what I missed and none of what I didn’t. Until I did. Because people are who they are. If he had wanted to change to keep me–us–then, well, he would have. Long ago. But this idea of a guy in every port appeals to me. I mean, I travel around for my physical life, why can’t my romantic life operate in the same vein?

My ex, having landed a lucrative job and glad to see me back on “The Rock”, takes me out to dinners and then brunches. He even brings me the soup I order while I make peace with a positive Covid test and enter into solitary confinement. To his credit, he was the only one who sat outside of the kitchen window I cracked open just enough to let my words drift out.

To his discredit, he cannot maintain this. Can’t or won’t. I’m not sure how much to really expect from a man who hasn’t seen his son since toddlerhood. As a child–and now adult–who still needs the father she was denied, this one fact has always felt like rubbing up against sandpaper. Yet, hope springs eternal. I come from a long line of women trying to fix the men they’re with; it’s in my blood. And I suspect it is this that propels me back into his arms. Along with the potential for sexapades that give me multiples.

But in the wise words of Madonna: satin sheets are very romantic but what happens when we’re not in bed? When we’re not in bed, we tend to slowly deteriorate. It may take days, weeks, or hours but we are not, have never been, sustainable.

I hold onto him for financial as well as sexual reasons. Maybe I reconcile those books in my own mind, in my own style of accounting. But some things can’t be bought and eventually I crave all the things our relationship couldn’t give me and the balance tips into the red. And I’m back to breaking up with him all over again.

But this time, the Universe gives me whiplash. In his place, in the space I’ve made, another friend steps in. He wants to go to dinner with me. He’s so enthralled with the experience that he pays. Here I was, holding onto something that was so easily replaced. What I feared was a loss shows up as a gain. Never again will I be able to settle for partial satisfaction. Instead I will make an altar of the emptiness of my life and see what offering the Divine decides to place upon it.

Or is there such a thing as emptiness at all? At times I envision this next best thing, person, place, feeling, thought that’s ready to move in is pushing the old thing, person, place, feeling, thought out the door. The new takes the old’s place while the seat is still warm. However it happens, it’s nothing short of miraculous.