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barely wake up before four in the evening on weekends was now awake, at ten in the morning, and calling me as if the world was about to end. And suddenly, I had the urge to read through his messages. In retrospect, it might have been a bad move.
    I don’t know if it was the effect of the dream, or the messages themselves or some strange wave of nostalgia that brought tears to my eyes.
     I LOVE YOU.
     I KNOW I’VE BEEN AN ASSHOLE.
     I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LIVE ANYMORE ELENA.
     I NEED TO SEE YOU. ONE MORE TIME. PLEASE.
    Plenty of other statements like that, most of them asking me to come up and meet him someplace. It didn’t have to be private; he just wanted to see me, one last time . A request that sounds genuine enough. Only, I had a vague idea how it was going to end. I had been dreading this. I felt like if I even so much as see his face again, I might give up on hating him, and I might get carried away in the torrent that is my ex-life with him. It’s the last thing I wanted to do but that fear is still there in the back of my mind, and I can’t help but feel a lot less angrier at him for what he did. I knew I was supposed to hate him for what he did for the rest of my life, and I should have accepted that he wasn’t going to change, not ever, but that stupid, odd voice inside my head kept screaming otherwise. Suddenly, I was remembering the good times we had, how romantic it was when it began. I remembered all the nice things he had done for me. Two days ago, when I started drinking a little more than usual, I actually got to wondering if it would be okay to just continue my life with him, and just get used to his faults in order to get my hands on the good stuff. And there is good stuff, a lot of it, I assure you. Enough to make me think that way, obviously.
    But it’s times like these, when you have to figure out whose side you’re on: his or yours.
    I almost ended up texting him a response from all the confusion, but I held myself back with a lot of effort. When Penny woke up I told her. “Nick says he wants to see me one last time.”
    She just stared back at me for a second, as if she was trying to say ‘right and you’re telling me this why’?
    “I can’t avoid him for the rest of my life,” I said, somewhat unsure.
    “You don’t have to,” Penny said, wisely enough. “Just until you know you’re over him. Just until the healing has begun and you’ve moved on. When you don’t have any of those left-over feelings.”
    “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
    “It will Elena,” she said. “It has to. There is no other way to do this. He’s not right for you and you know it. You’ve been doing so well without him so far. There’s no need to complicate matters by agreeing to see him.” My eyes were still glued to the message until Penny confiscated the phone. “Don’t let some random feelings of mere empathy for an ex, ruin your life. It’s not love. Love is a bond built on mutual understanding, loyalty, and affection. Not on the fizzling embers of fucked up relationships.”
    “I just keep having this urge to see him again, even though I also want to gouge his eyes out.”
    “I’m not saying it’s easy getting over seven years of your life with him, and I’m not saying it’s going to happen in one day. It’s stupid to expect that it will. I’m just saying, until you’re in a better frame of mind to figure things out, it’s best to just stay away.”
    Penny made a lot of sense for someone who had never been in a long-term relationship. Maybe that was why. She wasn’t ready to sacrifice her life for someone who wasn’t worth the effort. Perhaps she was right to wait. And as Penny likes to say, marriages and long term relationships are delusional ancient concepts anyway. She said statistically, most people do things not because they want to, but because something’s been programmed into their heads. I don’t always agree with her but it’s worth