“She wasn’t quite the angel that I’d remembered in my dreams
And I could tell the time had changed me
In her eyes too, it seemed
We tried to talk about the old days
Wasn’t much we could recall
Guess the lord knows what he’s doing after all…”
-Garth Brooks

Tonight is my kid’s last soccer game. From looking at the schedule though, I realized that the team they would be playing tonight is coached by… the wife of my high school boyfriend. I’m sort of less than enthused about attending tonight.

Seeing as how we both are back in the same small town where we went to high school, and we have children roughly the same age, I have seen him a handful of times in the past few years. He has actually never left the town, and he married a woman who graduated a year behind me. He was the first in my string of stupid boyfriends, and I when I say stupid, I’m not saying it to be bitchy, I’m saying it because he truly wasn’t the smartest boy I had ever dated. This is evidenced by the fact that he is two weeks older than me, and in high school, he was two years behind me.

I’m not saying he wasn’t a nice guy, because he was. He’d give any of his friends the shirt off his back. He was very into mechanics – he taught me how to change the brake shoes on his truck. He also taught me how to play chess and Mortal Kombat. I spent a lot of time at his house, and his best friends became my best friends. There was a posse of guys who had my back, who watched out for me, and treated me like a princess. I thought they looked at me as a sister (a myth that was busted when I broke up with High School Boyfriend, and two of his friends asked me out).

One night, he kissed another girl. I found out. I broke up with him.

Back then, a kiss was a huge deal, and boy I was so hurt by what he’d done. He’d stood by the fact that it wasn’t a huge deal, that he was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again. I couldn’t take it. He later amended that excuse to tell me that he was freaking out because I was getting ready to leave for college, and I’d be leaving him behind. He was scared, and unsure and basically, typical of a 17 year old guy, just didn’t entirely think it through before acting.

We were civil after that. I have never had the dramatic, full-of-hate breakup, so even when I ran into him a few years ago at a graduation party for my cousin (yes, he’s friends with my family – which compounded some of the awkwardness), we had a great chat. Even my husband had a good discussion with HSB about something (I have no idea what the hell they talked about), and my husband was so frustrated finding out later that he was talking to my ex. But that’s the way it’s been – I can now run into any of my exes and it’s not obvious that we’ve seen each other naked or swapped countless amounts of spit.

But cool as I may be about it, I don’t necessarily relish these moments. Living in this small town, I run into people from the past all the time – and while sometimes it’s fun to catch up, sometimes I’d rather just tuck my head down and walk the other way…very fast.

That’s how I felt this afternoon seeing the wife of an ex-boyfriend at my daughter’s school (and this happens A LOT), or last week running into my husband’s ex-wife as we were both picking up our kids, and how it’ll probably feel tonight, seeing my ex-boyfriend and his family at the soccer game.

As Debi says in Grosse Pointe Blank, “Everybody’s coming back to take stock of their lives. Know what I say? Leave your livestock alone.”