Cannot Stop Myself

This day started off pretty great. A little bit of spring in my step, a great visit from my friendly ex, and the pining of my not-so-friendly ex. Work duties had started to pile up, but they seemed attainable and reasonable. So I slogged through my day, spending some time at the office, then eventually coming in and calling it an early day.

My not-so-friendly ex had been hitting me up all day and apparently she had gotten into it with her roommate. We briefly discussed what was going on and she showed me a log of their discourse and damn… her roommate sucks. To kill some time before band practice, I hop onto one of the dating apps that I had been on and the first goddamn person I see on there is her roommate. So I screenshot it and send it to her with a “should I?” taunt. Of course she knows I never would, however I didn’t realize that seeing a screenshot from a dating app would put her into a shitty place. I probably should have realized that it would, however in the moment I was giggling with what I thought was a friend, sharing a simple experience that was well within my bounds to have. We wind up moving past that and apparently she’s not very upset particularly about his moment.

My Tuesday practice nights are sacred as I love the gentlemen, love the music, and we’ve been doing it for nearly a decade now. We’re all each other’s bestest friends. Adding anyone into this mix is always a thoughtful and vetted thing from me. So I invite my not-so-friendly ex over to practice, to say hi to the guys, and smoke a bowl or two with the promise of after practice she’d get to vent. This goes down without a hitch and her and I decide to go get some food. We drive down together and end up finding a place with an open kitchen downtown. The whole time we’re having a great discourse and she’s smiling a ton. So we wrap up eating and get in her car to come back. I had to drive as she’s deathly afraid of “big city drivin” (which I don’t live in a big city). As we make it back to my house to drop me off for the night, she begins to lose her composure, get extremely anxious, and cry. This triggers the comforter in me and I offer to drive her to her house. She asks me, “Do you have anything to do early in the morning?” and I tell her that I did not. We’ve been discussing how our sleep patterns were fucked and we’d been staying up until like 5 or 6 am. My assumption is that we’d be awake until late in the morning, then I’d head home. This meant sleepover to her.

We get to her house and luckily her roommate had fucked off to the bar for the night, so it was easy getting in and then set up in her bedroom to hang out for the evening. We begin discussing some stuff, having a good time, then she asks me to take off my clothes and get ready for bed. I was taken aback like, what? You want me in your bed all night with you? I thought we were going to hang out, mostly platonically while you work through the mental health shit you’re trying to work through. But she fell into old habits and treated me like I was her partner again from a few months ago. I wanted to join in on this delusion so badly, but it felt really wrong. So I kind of threw up a boundary to see how she’d react to this, and it was not well. I let her know I wanted to be there for her, but actually sleeping and staying over for the night was an intimacy line I wasn’t comfortable crossing with her. This confused the hell out of her in a very frustrated way. That immediately put me off and made me feel sick. At that moment I knew that I had made the right decision by enforcing this boundary as she had been having ulterior motives and unexpressed expectations of me that she had no problem enforcing on me without letting me even know the parameters. This was a theme through our whole relationship, I had realized.

I curled up on the corner of her bed, fully clothed, and went to sleep for a few hours while the driving services had time to get drivers available. I was up probably every hour or more to check the apps and see what was going on. At around 6am I finally found somebody and headed home. Jesus, that was an awful night after having a pretty decent day.