Saturday, September 26, 2009

GOING FORWARD BACKWARDS?

Lately, for the past month or so, I've been running into a lot of guys from my past -- or they've been tracking me down. Last night it happened again, this one an actual ghost of Christmas past. Luciano, a guy I met on Christmas Eve 2007, and I casually dated for about a month until we mutually decided that the timing wasn't quite right. (I was still kind of hung up on him.) We've run into each other a few times over the past nearly two years, and the last time we spoke (when I accidentally sent him a text message intended for another Luciano), he told me he was dating someone new.

Last night, I was at a bar and on my way to meet a few friends at Glam. On my way out, a group of people stopped me and asked if I was a friend of Luciano. I said, yes, I'm on my way to see him now, thinking they were talking about one of the friends I was heading out to meet. Turns out that the Luciano they were talking about was already there. I was lost. Who was this Luciano with whom I was so well acquainted? One of them showed me a photo in his phone, and it all came back to me. Then, as if on cue, Luciano was walking up me. We talked briefly. He had broken up with the guy he had been dating, and he still had my number in his phone. He invited me to go out with him on Saturday night, and that was that.

I wonder if all these blasts from my past are a sign that my future might lie behind me instead of ahead of me. Besides Khleber, my ex-boyfriend whom I dated five years ago, ten years after we broke up the first time, I've never re-dated an ex. In fact, I've only once had sex with an ex.

I remember an episode of The Cosby Show in which one of the Huxtable kids -- I think it was Vanessa (above) -- said, "The ship that sails west never sees the sunrise." Or maybe it was "The ship that sails backwards never reaches shore." I think it was the latter, but I prefer the former. Her point was this: Don't live in the past. Onward and forward!

I agreed. And as embarrassing as it is to admit, I applied something I heard on The Cosby Show to my own life. Up to now, Khleber and the occasional revisited fling aside, it's been onward and forward, if not exactly upward. But since I've spent the past three years shaking things up, why stop now? Who knows? Maybe a pleasant surprise awaits.

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