...And Ready To Mingle

Usually when my soon-to-be-ex-husband calls, I don't answer the phone. While our separation last May was as amicable as one could possibly hope for when one person (namely me) decides its time to dissolve a nine year relationship, there's been approximately next to nothing since I walked out our front door to bind the two of us, let alone inspire even the occasional phone call, aside from our mutual desire to have our personal matters finalized.

Today, I picked up.

The voice on the other end was familiar but also somehow startling in its sincere, overt sense of jubilance.

"You're single!"

"What?!"

"I just got back from the courthouse. Its done. You're single!"

"Uh, okay."

Our exchange continued pretty much in this same retarded vein for another few minutes...me trying to overcome the tremendous disbelief that after ten months of what often felt like backwards progress, the pace of the process to terminate our nuptials seemed to have escalated within the last 24 hours to near lightening speed.

And he's now my ex-husband.

That's when I started to cry.

A few weeks ago over dinner in Vancouver, as M3 and I were in the throes of exploring our potential exclusivity, I asked him if the fact that I'm technically still married had any bearing -- conscious or otherwise -- on his trepidatious feelings about committing to "us". His response escaped his lips almost before I'd even finished posing the question.

"No, not at all," he said.

Certain and resolute.

And so I believed him.

But as yet another week without M3 comes to an end...a solitary stretch marked by a continued struggle to temper, dispel or somehow otherwise semi-effectively manage the feelings of want and longing that overtake me when I'm supposed to be enjoying the other important and enriching aspects of my life that don't involve M3 and thus ensure my (debatable on even my best day) status as a well-rounded, modern and independent woman, I can't help but hope that whether he knew it or not at the time, just maybe he wasn't telling the entire truth that night in Vancouver.

We'll explore the answer to this and other pressing questions in t-minus three-ish hours when he rolls in to my mid-sized town.

Just as soon as I've had a cocktail and a pedicure.

P.S. On another note entirely, congratulations to my pal, The Girl at Hickopolis, on her recent relocation to the very same mid-sized city that M3 calls home. Like I need yet another reason...