On exes

I took a drive around Berkeley today before meeting a friend up for brunch. Since moving to the city, it's a rare occasion that I find myself in Berkeley, so I made an extra effort to joyride through the places I was familiar with. It was definitely a blast from the past, but the fact that I spent the majority of my college years in a serious relationship with one person, I found that most of the experiences and places I was excited about had a bittersweet emotion tied with it, since I'm no longer with that person.

Yet, we're still friends. That's something that most of my friends and my family can't understand. I'm not even on talking terms with the other two guys that I dated seriously, but this one particular guy I experienced college with -- we're still good friends. We're in completely different cities now, but we still manage to keep in touch and meet up when the chance arises, which has been pleasantly frequent in the last year or two.

I'm at a fork in the road now, because I actually found myself sending him a short line about the lack of snow at Tahoe this year (he liked to snowboard). It's a trivial one-lined email, but the implications behind it could be far more profound: we're all grown-ups and have weathered relationships where we were devastatingly invested; thinking about an ex randomly is probably not completely out of the ordinary, but acting upon it to let that person know you're thinking of them (even if in a platonic way) is [ insert completely inarticulate adjective ].

Is that adjective I'm searching for 'self-validating'? I seriously hope not...