LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

How's this for a truly awkward situation--which are rapidly becoming a dime a dozen in my life? Last night I was having drinks with my friend Luciano in one of my preferred Buenos Aires bars when a tall, dark and drop-dead handsome guy plopped down onto the lap of the scary-looking guy sitting on the stool right in front of us. It was my ex-boyfriend (the plopper, not the scary plopee, and the much younger guy of "Tick Tock..." fame in the post below).

Boy, does he get around. I had already spotted him from afar in a club the previous night straddling a different guy. (It's winter break, so all of the school boys are out playing this week.) My least favorite mistake, he looks fantastic. We dated for four months last year before parting ways. It wasn't a particularly amicable split, and we wasted no time getting to the stage where we sort of pretend that we don't see each other when we wind up in the same bar or club.

I'm not sure if he saw me, didn't see me, was pretending not to see me or was just ignoring me. Argentine boys are such a conundrum. What great actors they are! They love passionately, and once it's over, their apathy is just as intense, if that makes sense. A totally insecure person might think that the ex never really cared about me at all. And maybe he didn't. Perhaps he spent four months giving the performance of a lifetime. Or maybe he's giving one now. Or could it be that at the time of our breakup, I dispensed the gospel truth with too much gusto? It's my modus operandi in relationships. That and, to paraphrase Missy Elliott, I break up with them before they dump me. The gospel truth (here I go again!) is that I burn bridges when exiting a romance, wielding words like weapons with wild abandon--usually via email (I am, after all, a writer). Now before you go and brand me the bad guy, I never dump without just cause, and my indignation is normally justified. In the case of the ex, major lies were involved, huge cover-ups that could drive months of story on General Hospital.

Although I stand by everything I said--or rather, wrote--to the ex at the time, I later apologized via voice mail and email for the vicious way in which I said...um, wrote it. But the damage clearly had been done. He never responded to either message. Last night, as he made out with the scary guy, I was as surprised by my lack of internal reaction as I was by his poor taste. The good news is that I was looking particularly well (or so they were saying). Also, it's perfectly clear from the company that my ex is keeping that he's been downgrading. And I dodged a massive bullet.