The Curse Broke
I’d made peace with being hated by my exes. Ana and I had a name for it—the ex-girlfriend curse. You date someone, it ends badly or messily or just wrong, and suddenly you’re enemies. Or at least strangers who used to matter. Every relationship I’d been in followed this path. The reasons were always legitimate. I understood all of them.
For years that’s exactly how it went. Every girl I’d broken up with, every split that turned cold—they’d look through me at parties, give me that frozen stare on the street. I wasn’t going to fight it. It was just how things worked.
Then Becca somehow stayed in the picture after we ended. Which was already unusual. But this week something shifted completely. One by one the others started reaching out. Names I hadn’t heard from in years. Real conversations, not careful or distant, but like we actually wanted to talk to each other. We could joke around. Actually be warm with each other. There was real affection there.
I don’t want to jinx this, but the curse might be broken.
The mystery is why. All those years of resentment, all that contempt that hardened into something permanent—and then it just dissolved. Something shifted and I have no way of knowing what. That’s what bothers me.
As for Kathi and Geli, I’m not expecting much. Some patterns run too deep. But honestly, at this point I’ve stopped trying to understand how any of this works.