Do you believe in the saying, old lovers make the best friends? I do.

Old lovers know you so intimately. They have seen you naked, drunk, crying, laughing …sometimes all at the same time. You’ve walked miles in the park, swapping funny childhood tales. French kissed for hours with tongues burnt purple with too much cabernet.

Then one day, for whatever reason, they are gone from your side. They slowly stop inhabiting your dreams. There’s a goodwill box in the Aldi’s parking lot, and you finally, gently, stuff their old sweatshirt into it. Without tears.

Years later, you’re out with your today lover or your spouse and you run into them. Your eyes meet but you don’t speak, they know how to find you, you know they will, and they don’t disappoint.

So you meet for old time’s sake. Just to catch up. Over lunch with wine, or late day martinis, as you ponder the past, the theme is “remember when…?” Then, inevitably, “Ever wonder where we would be now if we stayed together? ” If you hadn’t slept with my cousin, or married that barmaid from our favorite pub, or if I hadn’t needed more of something, everything, from you. If you’d ever gotten divorced.

You forget the reality of now. Except when he begins telling you about his wife’s chemo treatments, how helpless he feels. You don’t know how to respond to that. Or he confides that he’s broke thanks to a gambling addiction his wife managed to hide for years, until their retirement money was tapped out. You think karma, baby, but you don’t say it out loud. Suddenly you’re offering up your own morsel of sin, something your husband would kill you for revealing, but you needed tit for tat. There, you feel so connected now .

There’s no need for sex, for the physical now between you. Not that it never crosses your mind, of course it does, and you wonder how he would react to your body so much older, barely recognizable even to you. The thought is alarming. Even in wild imagination you can’t get past the hotel room door, and how would you ever go home again? This is much better, baring only your soul, in small increments, and keeping your body to yourself. Much better.

Another lunch, then?