Are You Doing Our Things With Her Now?

I found a website a few days ago that my ex had made for someone he is dating now. I wish i could say i looked at it casually. I did not.

I clicked through almost every page. I looked at the fonts and the photographs and the little decisions that probably meant nothing to anyone except me. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it. If anything, i remember thinking ours was better, which is a slightly embarrassing thought to have about a website made for another woman, but heartbreak has made me competitive about stranger things.

A few years ago, he made one for me too.

We sat together while making it. I remember being annoyingly particular about everything. Moving things around, changing my mind, asking him if something looked stupid and then disagreeing when he said it did. It took time because we were actually making it together. Somewhere between choosing what went where and arguing about things nobody else would notice, it became one of those completely ordinary afternoons that you don’t think to preserve because you assume there will be hundreds more like it.

there weren’t.

When i saw the other website, what bothered me wasn’t really that he had made it. people are allowed to make more than one website in their lifetime. I knew this intellectually. Still, i kept wondering whether they had sat together too. Did she lean over his laptop and ask him to change something? did he get irritated when she changed her mind? did they laugh halfway through? did he show her something clever he had figured out and wait for her to be impressed? did an afternoon that once felt very specifically ours become something he could simply do again with somebody else?

I think this is one of the stranger parts of watching someone move on. You start finding out how many things you thought belonged to your relationship actually belonged to the person. Maybe he always makes things for people he loves. Maybe someone else will eventually receive the same kind of birthday surprise he once planned for you. Maybe he will take her to a restaurant you thought was yours. Maybe he will use the stupid voice that made you laugh. Maybe there are jokes you believed could only exist between the two of you that will somehow find their way into another kitchen, another bed, another person’s ordinary Tuesday.

There is something disappointing about discovering that love has reusable parts. I think i wanted ours to remain untouched after it ended. And no, not necessarily for him to remain in love with me forever because that would be an unreasonable thing to ask of someone whose life i am no longer in. But some childish part of me wanted the evidence of it to remain exclusive. I wanted certain gestures to retire with the relationship. I wanted there to be things he could never do again without thinking, even briefly, i used to do this with her.

And then i realised how unfair that was because i will do it too.

One day i will sit beside somebody else while he works on his laptop. I will send someone a song i once played in a different bedroom. I will take a new person somewhere i first went with an old one. I will cook things people taught me how to cook and tell stories containing phrases i stole so long ago that i have forgotten they were ever somebody else’s.

I will kiss someone with a mouth that learned what it liked from other mouths and that one unsettles me the most.

We like to imagine every relationship begins with two completely new people. It doesn’t and by the time someone meets you, so many people have already had a hand in making you. Someone taught you that you like your back scratched while falling asleep. Someone made you realise you hate being left alone during an argument. Someone introduced you to the song you now play every Sunday morning. Someone made you insecure about something you had never thought to dislike about yourself before. Someone else spent years undoing it without knowing they were repairing damage they didn’t cause. Eventually all of it becomes so mixed together that you cannot remember where you got what.

There are things i do now that belonged first to people i haven’t spoken to in years. Words i use because a friend used them constantly when i was nineteen. Music i found through someone i briefly slept with. Restaurants i still recommend even though the person who took me there no longer knows what my life looks like. Entire opinions i once developed during arguments with people whose phone numbers i no longer have.

I don’t really think about them every time and maybe that’s probably the strangest part. Something can come from a person and eventually stop feeling like it belongs to them at all. For a while after a breakup, everything has an owner. This is his song. That was our restaurant. This is the shirt i wore when we went there. This is the show we watched in bed. Even parts of the city become difficult because you have divided geography between two people. Then enough time passes and that ownership gets blurry.

You hear the song with somebody else. You return to the restaurant with your friends. You walk down the same road because unfortunately the municipal corporation did not agree to reroute it around your heartbreak. Slowly, things return to being things.

I wonder if people do too.

I still don’t know how i will feel the first time something beautiful with another person reminds me of him. I am scared that it will mean i haven’t moved on properly. That i’ll be sitting across from somebody who has done nothing wrong while a man from another version of my life briefly takes the empty chair beside us.

Maybe that will happen. Maybe someone will say something exactly the way he used to and for three seconds i will be twenty again. Maybe i’ll be kissed in a familiar way and remember another room. Maybe a future boyfriend will help me make something and i will think about that afternoon with the website.

But honestly, remembering someone is different from wanting them back. I am beginning to think moving on has much less to do with forgetting than i once believed because eventually the memory arrives without asking you to do anything about it.

You don’t check their profile afterward. You don’t wonder who they’re doing it with now. You don’t spend the evening constructing an imaginary version of their life. You simply remember that once, a person you loved sat beside you at a laptop and made something with you and then you return to the person sitting beside you now.

There is something comforting about that possibility because i don’t actually want to erase everyone i have loved in order to prove that i am capable of loving somebody new. I don’t want every relationship that ends to require me to become the person i was before it began. I couldn’t even if I tried because love changes your vocabulary.

It changes what you order, what you tolerate, what you notice, what you need. Sometimes it gives you terrible habits you spend years trying to remove. Sometimes it leaves behind something useful. Sometimes a person disappears and you realise months later that you are still carrying a tiny thing they gave you without meaning to.

Perhaps the person i love next will meet some of those things. He will meet preferences i discovered with somebody else. Boundaries that exist because somebody crossed them before him. Softness that other people taught me. Caution they caused. Jokes they left behind. maybe even a few songs that will always contain another person’s face somewhere very faintly in the background.

And i will meet his versions of those things too. That’s what intimacy actually asks of us as we get older. Not to find somebody untouched by everybody who came before us, but to understand that we are meeting a person with fingerprints all over them and loving them anyway.

I don’t know whether my ex thought about me while making that website…maybe he did. maybe he didn’t. I think a few weeks ago i would have desperately wanted to know.

Now i am more interested in the afternoon when we made mine. And this is certainly not because i want it back, god NO. It is because there was once a version of my life where we sat beside each other making tiny decisions about fonts and photographs and neither of us knew that one day i would remember the afternoon more clearly than the website itself.

And maybe he will make ten more and maybe i will too. It doesn’t make that afternoon less ours. You don’t return everything when you break up. Some of it became you.