Like picking at a scab...

So I got a "note" today from my ex wishing me a happy birthday. My first reaction was surprise and after reading it my secondary reaction was to wonder sort of angrily why she even bothered writing it???

Many of you may or may not know that I have been relatively single for the last year. The short answer is that my dating pool hasn't been the best, the longer more complex issue is that I was also getting over the damage from breaking up with my ex. We were together the better part of two years, but lets take the amount of time out of it and just make the point that it was the quality of the the love that we had for each other that made the relationship special. Once we broke up that wasn't something that was easily healed...well at least not for me but we'll call that another story. We broke up in June of last year and by that September had more falling out which led to all communication going out the window.

In Decemeber I get a phone call from her apologizing for how things went bad in Septemeber and aside from another trivial email a month or two after that we didn't speak anymore and I didn't give communication with her another thought. She had moved on with someone else, moved thousands of miles away, we didn't have that much in common anymore, I could pick tons of reasons why we just hadn't kept in touch. I could name lots of good reasons why we didn't need to keep in touch. Nothing mean spirited, just sometimes you need to move on with your life right?

So I'm spending my last year dating other people, getting over the emotional investment losses and moving on. I'm not having as much success as I would like romantically but hey how many single people are always finding exactly what they want anyways right? Then I get that note and it just seemed so out of place and also so...trivial.

The note essentially contained the contents of a computer generated greeting card that your bank might send you every year just so they seem more caring. The note felt exactly like that...like she didn't want to make a real effort to keep my business but just enough that I wouldn't forget that she was a part of my life. You know what? I spent two years with you and one fairly painful year apart from you...I don't really need a baseless birthday note from you to remind me of the relevance you had in the grand scheme of Jeremy.

So why write the note? I guess that my question of the day. I didn't get anything from her for Christmas, I didn't hear from her when my mom had a biopsy, she hasn't kept in touch with me for jack shit on anything else. Why do I rate a birthday "note" all of a sudden? Had it been a nice email just saying that she wanted to keep in touch more often and left the door open to be, at least more civil and friendly then at least I could have had something more to go on. Yet I get this note, two days early I might add, that essentially just says happy birthday and I can't figure out why you make that effort for someone you don't even talk to anymore.

Maybe I'm cranky, maybe I'm just not seeing the picture, but I know that when I don't really keep in touch with someone after about a year I'm not going to be sending them birthday notes. I'm not saying she's wanting me back or something nefarious is afoot...I guess I'm just irritated because I have to think about her again and i didn't want to.