Talking to my Ex about Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and God
The full audio & a little Libra reflection
On Saturday I had coffee with a wonderful, new friend who I’m platonically smitten with and will be introducing to the Hot Literati Universe soon. We got into our backgrounds and I dove into my stint as a Tradwife/WAG abroad. I look back on this time with mixed feelings. I would wake up in the morning and walk across these train tracks to sit in front of this beautiful field watching the sunrise with a cup of coffee and my Bible.
I love the public library and you love the public library and we love the public library.
But I would also make chicken pot pie from scratch in the evenings and wait for him to get home from work. It was lonely. It was complicated, for other reasons.
And I could only really write with gin. Or sober in the dark, scribbling after he’d fallen asleep. I had all the time in the world to write. But I found it really difficult to carve out the conscious space while living with someone else, while being with someone else.
When I am single, I think about writing all the time. I have the compulsion to write every single day. I write. I write!
I told my new friend the story of this one day me & my ex were together. We were driving to pick up Greek food at this restaurant his family loved, and I grew to love. I loved visiting him. I love his family. I miss them sometimes. His grandmother liked my Instagram stories for months. I wasn’t sure anyone told her that we broke up.
I’m sitting in the passenger side, and I get this idea in me to read our astrological compatibility.
“Ohhh you’re messy” my new friend says. I explain that we, at Hot Literati are not messy, we’re just erratic sometimes. You have to act out of character every now and then, to prove that you are real. So, read the horoscopes?
I do. Out loud. And it describes the very same issues we were trying to figure out. The same dissonance, the same consistent tiffs. The same things we’d argue about 6 months later in a hotel room in Amsterdam. We never really argue argued though. We argued softly. We were always soft with one another, even when we weren’t.
I think truly healing from something, especially a breakup, is being able to look at what you had with love and gratitude, even if there were tiffs, and even if it ended.
I cared deeply for him and I still do. He is the first person to ever call me Hailo.
Here is a conversation between the two of us. Not the first since our breakup, but a good one nonetheless. I think you will be able to understand how we were together for four years.
Enjoy. Call your ex after. Grab a coffee with them. Maybe the two of you can start a podcast, if you don’t get back together.
Maybe you can do both…