The Last Beautiful Girl In the World

The importance of staying friends with your exes.

I have discovered that it is a very unusual feature of my life that I have stayed close friends with almost all of my ex-boyfriends. My ex with whom I owned a house, we were together for a decade, is one of my two closest friends in the world. My other ex is my other closest friend. We text or talk daily. If either one of them had a life-threatening illness or accident I’d be on the first plane to be there to help.

Many of my subscribers were boyfriends ages ago or not so many ages ago. We were nineteen, or thirty-five, or whenever. If I loved you then, why wouldn’t I love you now?

My exes for the most part turned out to be wonderful husbands and fathers. Even if they claim to be liberal, and many thank heaven do not, they live conservative values. As I get older and start to come out I realize I was always one of them.

Now of course I do have thoughts about what would have happened if… there’s one both my mom and I think I should have married. And it’s not the one you think. Unless you are that one in which case you can probably guess.

If I were my friend Jill’s age, my life would have been different. I think that if I had come of age twenty years later, I’d have been a conservative from the start.

Years and years ago, I was in a terrible fight with my old boss who was like a father to me. I was distraught over it. My mom, who is full of wisdom, said, “Life is long.”

She was right. Life is long. We get over things. My old boss and I are friends, we call each other on our birthday’s.

I remind myself that every time I’ve gotten my heartbroken God has opened a new door.

Matchbox Twenty says, in the song whose title makes my title today:

All of the wasted days… the memory of your face.

It won’t be the first heart you break. You won’t be the last beautiful girl.

For thirty years I’ve been saying, “The next time I get my heart broken I’m flying to Tel Aviv.”

This is not the greatest time to fly to Tel Aviv. So I might have to wait a bit to ask Gadi out for coffee in Tel Aviv and ask Ari… Ari… to show me the sights of Jerusalem.

But this too shall pass.

Next year in Jerusalem. Maybe I mean it. Maybe next year I will go to Jerusalem. Passover with Ari… something worth living for.

The spring is coming and the flowers are out. I can have the windows open for the kitty to smell the spring air. I worry about my kids. We almost got shot on Thursday. It took a bit for the reality to hit me, but it did. We all came very close to dead that day.

Life is precious. I can not bring Morgan back, or any of the family members who my children wear in angel wing necklaces. But I can live mine, and I can do all I can to give these sweet (and annoying!) babies who are taller than I am a life that they deserve.

Sunny loved that pond. You can tell how old she was then. She was nearing the end. She lived her live up to almost eighteen, never a day on a leash or caged. Free and happy to the end.