Two Exes, No Waiting.

Due to confusion about our new public transport ticketing system, of which I've now been mercifully relieved, I walked my son to school for four days straight this week.  The upshot of this was getting to spend quality time with my son, and losing three kilo's that I've been, intermittently, trying to shed for some time.  But, being out in the world for long periods without the cover of a hulking, crowded vehicle means that you don't blend in, and will inevitably bump into someone you know.  Well, that bitch Madame Fate had her sites set firmly on me, and was no doubt rubbing her hands together with glee when she decided to throw three people into my path whom I had only seen myself bumping into again in my nightmares.  Seriously, innocently plunging into an open manhole would have been preferable to seeing these guys again - particularly without a ring on my finger.
On Tuesday, I decided it would be a good idea to take our two dogs on the morning leg of the journey, and make it count as their exercise for the day.  A wonderful idea, in theory.  Things had gone swimmingly when I dropped my son off, and I was just rounding the corner when Pepi Le Pew, the less sociable canine of the two, decided to take on a Corgi.  The Corgi was having none of it and a fight soon ensued.  The melee was soon broken up but I was, understandably, rebuffed by the owner of the dog for not maintaining stronger control over my charges and, I'm sorry to say, I let forth with a string of expletives that would have made Andrew Dice Clay blush.  It was only when he failed to respond that I finally got a good look at the man's face and recognised him as someone with whom I had shared a brief liaison six years before.  That encounter, much like the current one, hadn't gone well either.  He was a chef who had just emigrated to Australia, and I introduced him to my best friend as German. 
'I am Austrian,' he sniffed.
Needless to say, no follow-up phone call was received after our forty-eight hour dalliance, and I don't think his impression of me was much improved by our reunion. 
No big loss.
On Wednesday, having decided to walk the dogs when I got home, I was enjoying a stress-free return from school when I found myself waiting at traffic lights.  Flushed with aerobically-induced endorphins, I was enjoying some pleasant deep breathing when who should pull up on his bike amidst a sea of utes, luxury sedans and four-wheel-drives but Aaron who, for my regular readers, needs no introduction.  Seeing as one of the last things I said to him was that I was looking for a real relationship, I was naturally caught off guard at being caught out in the open sans finger jewellery; (you and I know my feelings about matrimony, but I wanted to leave him with absolutely no hope whatsoever of a reconciliation).  Clasping my hands together behind my back, I casually looked straight ahead, focusing on the little red man in front of me so as to avoid the gaze of the muscular white man in Lycra a few centimetres away.  As it turned out, my efforts to appear non-chalent were unnecessary; when I finally decided it was safe to look again, as casually as possible, he too was looking straight ahead, with an impassioned determination on his face I hadn't seen since the last time we were intimate. 
Once the little red man before me turned into his green alter-ego, I tripped across the crossing and headed for home, secure in the knowledge that I had shown Aaron I didn't need him to be happy.  Which I definitely do not.
Flustered as I initially was to have run into two ex flames in twenty-four hours, I now look upon it as therapeutic.  Far from being the malicious imp I thought her to be, fate was in fact sending me a message.  The past is the past.  Humorous or horrendous, mistakes are there to be learnt from.  Some of us pass our exams first time out with flying colours, some of us need multiple make-ups, but we do eventually learn not to ignore that voice in our heads, that persistent, sometimes annoying little voice that is desperately trying to keep us from winding up in a detention of our own making.