History Calling

“Listen, when you’re little and you don’t know better, you go up to a hot stove and you touch it and you get burned. Because you don’t know that a hot stove will burn you. But then you learn. And you don’t touch the hot stove anymore.” Jules said. “So don’t touch the hot stove again.”
The Stove in question was a bad idea from the start. He was a going-nowhere addict that hadn’t graduated from any of the three institutions he had gone two in the past six years.
Of course, I fell in love with him.
From the time I was 19 to the time I was 23, the only person I was really interested in was the stove. I dated other people. I slept with other people. But it always came back to him. Even after not talking to him for over a year once, seeing him ignited all the old feelings again. But when he didn’t return my calls the last time, I decided enough was enough and put actual energy into getting over him and it actually worked. I did a damned fine job, in fact. Sure, I thought about him now and then, when something jogged a specific memory, but those times were few and far between and the feelings had changed. I thought about him with nostalgia now, not lust.
Nearly two years after the last time I saw him, which was also the last time I spoke to him, I was having a couple of late-Saturday-afternoon drinks with a few friends when my cell phone rang an unfamiliar number with a 718 area code. I picked it up, wondering which one of my Staten Island family members got a hold of my cell number.
“Hello?”
“L?”
“Yes?”
“It’s the Stove.”
“Oh my god.”
“I live in Brooklyn now.”
“Oh my god.” Part of the whole getting over him process was that he lived on another coast. An essential part. A key part. Basically, what my whole process was based on. I walked out of the bar.
We chatted for a few minutes then I got off the phone (didn’t want to be ruder than I already had been). Our bar party broke up shortly thereafter and I immediately got J on the phone.
“The Stove called. He lives in Brooklyn now.”
J snickered.
More history: J was the reason I met the Stove in the first place. They were in film school together. We met at a film student party. J loves me. She loves the Stove.
She hates the two of us together.
“I love you. I love the Stove. I just don’t love you and the Stove together,” J was saying. “Besides, he’s probably bald by now.”
A just called me right out. “So, are you going to see him?”
“Probably.”
“So … Definitely,” A said, laughing.
“Ummm … yeah.”
There are people in your life that you know are a bad idea from the start, but you can’t help being attracted to them. No matter how toxic the relationship, how stupid you feel when he pulls the same shit he’s been pulling from the beginning, there’s something that pulls you in. What is that? What is that masochistic tendency that lives inside so many of us that they wrote a best-selling book about it?
When you find out what it is, drop me a line so I know just exactly what it is that’s wondering why he hasn’t called me back yet.