P.S.

I knew there was something else I meant to tell you!

So yesterday out of the blue a guy friend from college IMed me. We hadn't spoken in well over a year, so it really was out of the blue. I'm not sure how to describe my relationship with this guy. The simplest way to put it is that he's a guy who was always more interested in me than I was in him. Which is not to say I wasn't interested in him at all, because we had a certain amount of chemistry and I think he's a nice, entertaining guy. And we had some "moments", if you will. But he just never did all that much for me. And it didn't help that for a period of time Kymberli was pretty interested in him. That obviously would have put a kink in things had I actually been interested in him in a serious way, and since I wasn't interested in him in much of any way at all, it was even more reason for me to just kind of laugh off his advances. Which is what I spent much of senior year of college doing.
He caught me off guard and kissed me once at a Christmas party, and there was a period of about a week during spring of senior year when I was on the outs with College Ex and briefly considered whether I could date this friend, but after going on a couple of dates I realized that I was forcing things and just didn't feel the same spark he apparently thought he did. He is also the friend behind the "This is not a pleasure shower, this is a business shower" story, a story that has now become somewhat infamous here at grad school, mostly because my friend Amanda loves it an insists I tell it to everyone. Maybe I'll tell that story one of these days, although it's an entry in and of itself. But I'm sure you can sort of infer what happened just from the story's title.
At any rate, this guy and I had an interesting friendship that definitely could have become something more and I think would have become something more had he had his way. Instead I moved down here, and he started dating someone else seriously after I moved.
Well, lo and behold he's suddenly IMing me again. And why am I not at all surprised to hear that he broke up with his girlfriend extremely recently (like, days ago)? Guys love to do this to me. Every guy that I've ever dated seriously, or casually, or not even dated but almost-dated, has eventually tried to come back around. Some of them have done it multiple times. For the most part, I try not to encourage them when they do this (the notable exception of Mike notwithstanding, even though I mostly know better now). I know I should be flattered, and I am. It's good that the guys from my past think of me fondly enough that every time they end a relationship they dust the memories off again and wonder why we let each other go in the first place. But of course the flip side to that coin is that if I'm really good enough to keep them coming back, why did they let me go in the first place (because even if I was the one that let them go technically, they let it happen)?
I referred to myself as "back burner girl for the whole world" when I was telling this story to Kymberli just now, and I was mostly joking, but really! What are all these guys going to do when I'm seriously off the market one of these days? They can't keep thinking I'm always going to be there for them, because I'm not. I'm ALREADY not. As a friend, yes, of course. As anything else, well, I think College Ex got a wake up call last time he came down here and realized I was serious about just wanting to be friends. I suppose I'll have to get to that point with this guy eventually, too, if it comes to that. I don't hang out on the back burner these days. Hell, at this point I don't think I'm even on the stove. But that's gotta be better in the long run than being the girl he comes back to. For someone, I want to be the girl he never leaves in the first place.