Oh, grow up.

Last night, I heard laughter eminating from my downstairs neighbor's apartment, knocked, and was given permission to enter. My neighbor, her friend, and ex-Sara were together in the bedroom, discussing relationships. I hadn't seen Sara in six months. I regretted not going straight to bed.

I'm not an acrimonious fellow, no acrimony, me. Oh, I've held my share of grudges, scorn, spite and even hostility, but they're temporary emotions. I go online and read a few Family Circus comics, drink warm milk, and problem solved. I will now say unhesitatingly that any awkwardness I yet feel when thinking about Sara is justifyable. For whatever her reasons, insecurity, immaturity, possessivness, riding underwear, she wasn't very kind to me in the final throes of our relationship.

Here's what gets me: no questions. There was nothing even approximating a shred of interest in what I've been up to for the past six months. A lot happens in six months. I had to throw out the bamboo plant in my office. Apparently water needs to be changed more than once every three months. And graduate school (which she didn't support at all, despite her not even having a four-year degree.) Oddly, when I felt backed into a corner and lunged like a rat, she had the cheek to accuse me of attacking her academic credentials. Yea, like it's my problem.

A week ago, she sent me a text message that read: move your car. For the eightieth time that week, the Cathedral was having an event, and so all of my street was off-limits. So, I moved it. I came back to a text that said: you're welcome. How's that for a 'fuck you?' I didn't even know who the hell it was, since I'd long since deleted her number. Seriously, though; who does that kind of juvenile shit? What did she want, the money I might spent on a ticket? A song and dance? A four-year degree?

My downstairs neighbor is a kind person, generous and musically talented. She has more positive energy in an eyelash than Sara does in her body. Facts are facts, check your field guides. It's offputting to me that whenever I want to enjoy her company, I now have to contend with an unwelcome presence. TWO unwelcome presences: my neighbor's idiot cat lusts for blood.

I stayed with her for a while because there was sex involved, and her apartment was a few thousand degrees cooler than mine in the summer. Nearly everyday, I thought about turning to her and announcing that it wasn't working out. I didn't do it, because I thought that maybe that's just what people have to slog through in order to make things last. I was miserable. She didn't know the half of it, because I'm a man, and a Minnesotan man at that, and open up as easily as a blister pack.

What it comes to is that even if I dislike a person, I can still summon the decency to ask a few cursory questions, the kind that everyone should ask as a matter of being human: how's life? How's work? How's that rash doing? That's what people do. Those are skills you learn, or should learn as you grow up, drop the chip on your shoulder, and develop empathy. She's very purile and unsophisticated, and it's made me realize that in the final analysis, she has to live with herself, and that, my friends, is cosmic punishment enough to combine with some comic strips and put a crooked smile on my face.