I am starting to conform to stereotype - the one where lesbians stay friends with their exes. It's not even all that long since I wrote a rant against that very thing and I guess I have to blame stuff for this turnaround. So here goes.
I have exes who are really good people, who, despite having survived the horror or relationships with me, are compassionate enough to want to be friends. Somewhere along the way I guess I also pulled my head out of my ass long enough to see them for the good people they are and not just the hurts we inflicted on each other after the bubble burst.
Facebook, despite being such an evil sort of a megalith in so many ways, has returned some rather precious lost souls to me and as a result, one of the exes that I am now proud to call my friend, is an ex boyfriend from many years and lives ago. OK, my very first girlfriend has now rejected my friend request ... twice. And my first love sent a message via someone else that she was glad to hear I'm still processing oxygen, but has no desire to be friends. It has also, however, brought some exes back into my life on that superficial Facebook level, where even if you don't have enough in common anymore to sustain a conversation, you can still poke each other from time to time without the usual precautions and after effects. I'm even in touch with a couple of one night stands, which is entertainingly surreal at times.
Perhaps another big factor is time - good old time, which heals stuff and steals other stuff and blurs a whole lot of other stuff until you feel remarkably calm about most stuff. We get older and kinder (hopefully) and approaching middle age, we do that audit - the one epitomised so well in Hi-Fidelity (book and film) and look back at the people whose unfinished stories still haunt us somehow.
Then of course there's the ghetto aspect. The amount of out lesbians in South Africa is just too small to go around alienating people; we're all part of the damn chart whether we like it or not. I managed to avoid getting involved with the ex of an ex until I was about thirty somehow, but since then it's all gone a little L Word.
So, dear lesbians, you were right all the time and I ... I was wrong. I'm sorry for all the disparaging invective I've spewed forth on the subject and I am sorrier to the exes whose exes I resented.
