Over the past three years I have become convinced of something. Some people will be skeptical. Others will directly say I’m full of it, but, ladies, read this and think about how many times in your life this has happened to you. I’ll start with a little story about myself.
In the past year, specifically in the nine months of my junior year of college, my life has been filled with a parade of men (See my Parade of Men post, if you’re missing the reference. Although according to one of my best friends, my taste has vastly improved over this amount of time but that’s beside the point.) Because of the fact that there had indeed been a parade of men, I felt compelled to instigate a “man fast”, if you will, starting as soon as I left school for summer vacation.
True, my options were going to take a drastic decline in numbers anyway due to this temporary change in location.
However, I had just finished declaring my resolution to my roommates and not five minutes later I got a text from the one guy who could tempt me to break it. This seemed like evidence enough for me if I hadn’t already been convinced of this one fact:
Men have ESP.
There has got to be some sixth sense, some mechanism in their brain, a metaphorical light bulb that instantaneously turns on or an alarm that blares to life to let them know: we’ve been thinking of you randomly; your name came up in conversation for the first time in a year; we’re moving on and found someone else; or, in my case, I’m taking a vacation, a three month hiatus from men. This is the exact moment a man will call, text, pass you on the street, Facebook inbox, or email us. In other words, they’ll break the silence you’ve had between you for however many months or year it has been since you last spoke.
I’m not the only one who thinks this or believes it to be true. My roommate Nicki and I have discussed this at length numerous times. In fact, one time we were talking about it and our conversation had transferred over to the man of the hour. We were discussing how frustrating it was that he had yet to make a move when (beep beep!) her phone rang for a text just received. Yup, you guessed it – the man of the hour.
Others have been converted into believers as well. Let me tell you about the weekend of and week after the 4th of July…
In the span of seven days, not one, not two but three of my closest friends, plus me, had the silence broken by the ex that broke our hearts. This seems rather peculiar to me since we were all in separate cities and time zones from one another and the length of silence ranged anywhere from nine months to 4 years. Here are their stories:
Friend 1: received a text asking how she was doing. It had been nine months and she was just starting to date another guy.
Friend 2: had a run-in at the local country club where she and her arch-nemesis (and also her ex’s new girlfriend) belong. He was with the new girlfriend. Needless to say, the fireworks weren’t just in the sky that 4th of July. The air crackled with palpable tension. They hadn’t seen each other or talked in nearly four years. Friend 2 was also “talking to” someone new.
Friend 3: received a text, a phone call, a friend request and an inbox on Facebook. Talk about persistence! He really wanted to get ahold of her in spite of the fact that they hadn’t seen each other or spoken in two and a half years and he’d had a girlfriend for the roughly same amount of time. Friend 3 was doing it big in LA – something said ex never thought she’d actually do.
And then there’s me: Now it’s been a year and a half since my last run-in with the ex. I’d successfully cut him out of my life and avoided running into him for that long – quite a feat since we live five minutes from each other. But my time was up. I was driving home from the movie theater with my parents in the car when I hear my mom say, “Uh oh.”
“What?” I ask, thinking she’s going to be sick from the Mexican food we’d eaten before the movie. No such luck.
“I think I just saw {ex},” she says with hesitation in her voice as if she were worried what my reaction would be.
The series of questions and answers that ensued after this statement left me with a feeling of dread and anticipation because I knew it was him. I was simultaneously attempting to convince my mother and myself that it was his little brother. That is, until I saw his headlights in my rearview mirror. There was no denying it. It was him. That one move gave him away. You see, we live five minutes apart but from the direction we were both coming from there is a better, quicker way for him to go home. What I’m saying is, he added time to his trip, went out of his way just to drive by me. Which he did. He passed me on the right, followed by his older brother and then cut in front of me in my lane where he sped down the street.
Was this enough though? Of course not.
He was nearly to his turn when I saw his break lights illuminating the night sky of the considerable distance between us. I knew what he was doing. He was waiting for me to pass by him so he could catch a glimpse of me (as I’d be on his right, now). And that’s exactly what he did. He waited…for three cars of oncoming traffic to pass him between which he had ample time to turn, mind you, for me to pass.
Typical.
I’d just been thinking about him on the way home because of a high school couple I’d seen walking out of the movie to the boy’s truck. Whatever, a memory of us popped in my head and I’d been in absent-minded contemplation when my mom first spotted him.
Chance? Fate? ESP? I’d let this one fall between chance and ESP due to the fact that I, upon arriving home five minutes later, received a text from my best guy friend, “Hey guess who I just saw tonight?” You know it! My ex. These two in the same room can’t help but remind them of our sordid past as, well, they hate each other.
That was all in a seven day period! Since then, in the past month, things have quieted for Friends 1 and 2. They have resumed their silence as if nothing had ever broken it. Friend 3 actually talked to her ex and caught up in a friendly manner. And I? I have not seemed to shake this guy.
He was behind me one morning on my way to work after I’d already passed his dad by my neighborhood. He drove to my house one night and was sitting outside until my mom, thinking it was my cousin dropping me off, opened the front door to let me in. He sped off and I came home only moments later. He was at the gas station when I went to fill up my tank and, although this was the first time we had occupied the same space in person and not while driving, we didn’t speak or acknowledge one another. We both knew the other was there yet neither of us was ready for the inevitable face to face conversation. We played our usual game and left without a word.
Finally, after years of observation, my beliefs were as close to being confirmed as it gets (apart from all the other evidence).
Men have ESP.
I was talking to my male cousin (the one who was dropping me off that night actually) and I asked him what that drive-by meant. It has been a year and a half and he’s had a new girlfriend for a year (I’d recently been told he made a big show about it on Facebook). So why was he popping up everywhere and driving by my house?
And my cousin answered, “Because we have ESP!” Ha-ha just kidding. But it was close. He said, “There is still a part of him that doesn’t want to let go…He wants the best of both worlds.”
“I was afraid of that,” I responded.
And then the kicker, “Ya…it is in a guy’s DNA to miss you and wonder what it would be like to still be with you and yet not have the balls to do anything about it.”
Genius! Proof!
Men have ESP. I’m convinced.
