Whimper

Well, despite best efforts, Lisa and I are no more…again. We went at the second wind with an eye toward allowing each other a little more space and toward not trying to spend every last minute together. With most of the weekend left to ourselves, we had made plans to have dinner Sunday evening, but then, by Sunday afternoon, Lisa was unreachable.

She had accidentally washed her phone with the laundry, and had apparently spent much of the day getting her old phone back on the grid. During that time I called several times, but she wasn't even able to get the messages.

On Friday she had gotten back some test results from blood work done as part of a routine exam. Her family has a history of heart trouble, as both her father and grandfather died in their sleep relatively young. As one can imagine, this is cause for Lisa's great concern, as she already has high cholesterol thanks to her heredity. The news from her doctor was not good: she is at a heightened risk for a heart attack, and he instructed her immediately to take some baby aspirin and to begin taking a prescription medication.

So, all of this information, plus the prior week of our breakup and subsequent reconciliation, and her concerns for the future, weighed on her mind all weekend, according to what she told me this afternoon.

She got her old phone working again and, despite my voice- and text messages, did not call me. Unable to reach her by phone, I had gone to her apartment in the late Sunday afternoon, assuming that we were still on for dinner, but she was not home. I didn't want her to think I had forgotten about our plans, so I stopped by her place several more times, finally giving up on her around 7:30 when she still had not gotten home.

Late Sunday evening I sent her an e-mail (she has no computer at home, so she has sent me e-mails from her work computer) and let her know that I was a little pissed off that she had forgotten about our plans for the evening, upset that I couldn't reach her, and worried that I hadn't heard anything from her all evening.

By 2:00 Monday afternoon I still had not heard back from her. Certain that the prolonged silence between us didn't bode well for our relationship, I tried calling her once again. She answered and, after some small-talk, told me that with all that's going on, she didn't think she should be in a relationship with anyone until she got her shit together.

Despite harboring a suspicion that she was getting revenge for my dumping her and leaving her at that party last weekend, and that she was "not one to be dumped" but rather preferred to do the dumping, and therefore made up with me just so she could dump me, I accepted her explanation. She said she wants to remain friends with me.

Well, as anyone who has read my most recent posts may surmise, this has been one fairly tumultuous month — even tumuluouser (yeah, I know) over the past two weeks! I had had just about all the tumult I could stomach, so, alone with my thoughts all throughout Sunday's communication blackout, I had actually prepared for this as one potential (and the most likely) outcome. I had anticipated it being more adversarial, but, fortunately, it was merely somewhat cold.

And so, I belly-flop back into the dating pool with only a few regrets: I really enjoyed Lisa's company for the greater majority of our time together, and so will truly miss that; we had blue-skyed about all sorts of things we thought we would like to do together in the future, but those things probably will never happen. And I doubt, despite our presumably continuing friendship, that we'll have any more sex.