I Need Your Help, Friends

“All of my exes came back after we broke up. They all said the same shit. ‘I didn't know what I had until you left.’ Or ‘No one treats me better than you’. Even when I moved back up here, my ex called asking if she could come- I told her ‘no’, but it was like...Jesus.” 

I remembered that today. Just now as Ranger left my apartment. $@719 said it to me on September 20th of 2021 at dinner, at the restaurant next to Bar Pitti that's since closed. We’d gone there since we couldn't get a table at Bar Pitti. If you don't know by now, my memory is obscene. There's very little that I truly forget. I put things away and retrieve them when needed, but sometimes, the memories come on their own. Via a function that I fondly referred to as “The Ghost of Conversations Past”. The Ghost of Conversations past in my worst states manifests as a sort of apparition that I do my best to run from.  In my best states, I don't see her coming. I am happy and because of that not realizing that she has something to show me. That happened today. When she brought me that from $@719. Now as I write, she brings me another. 

“You’re just like me when I was your age. You won't understand the things I teach you now, but it's going to click when you've lived more” 

🫥

Well, it clicked. Not in the way he believed it would, but it clicked.

Ranger and I just finished a very tame conversation about the state of romance in our relationship. I, selfishly, spoke as inside thought out loud. I told him that I felt like I was kissing a girl and that it wasn't doing anything for me. As soon as the words left my lips, I wished I could put them back inside. He looked as though I'd stabbed him in the back. I suppose I did stab him in the back. I wish I didn't feel that way. We talked for a bit. Tried to see each other’s reality, but no progress was made. It's hard to make progress in a conversation when you're hurting. I thought of what $@719 said about his exes because I thought about what it would be like to go on without Ranger. Ranger… my perfect, wonderful, handsome, generous, funny, kind, successful, intelligent, and enviable partner. I would certainly regret it. There is much to regret about not being compatible with someone so objectively fantastic. $@719 was to those girls what Ranger is to me. Though, strangely, $@719 never was to me what Ranger is. Yet, somehow, he has managed to assault my mind for all these years via the Ghost of Conversations past. Perhaps because he was right in saying that I am just like him. I suppose I'm grateful that Allah gave me all these lessons to learn from him. I just wish he'd chosen a less aggravating vessel. Unlike the girls in $@719’s story, I know very well what I have with Ranger. I see the envy, the evil eye, and the frustration from both men and women in my life. How grateful I am to have a man that other men feel so offended by that they call him a “simp”. To have a man so sweet that women chastise their own boyfriends for not being more like him. I am so aware of what I have that I selfishly hold him to me despite knowing that our romantic relationship is floundering. I try to breathe life into it. I do. But CPR cannot help something on life support. Not wanting to give up, I turn to you, friends. Tell me… how do I fix the intimacy between me and Ranger?