The night after the full moon, Sam picked me up in his fancy BMW motorcycle. We went to Griffith Observatory and then for Ethiopian food. As the wind rushed through my hair, I saw LA streets and neighborhoods connect together. I felt so close to the action and yet a bit numbed by it (or maybe the helmut squeezing my head), as we drove through Hollywood lights and then into the darkness of Beverly Hills, way up high into the hills. It was a chilly night, and the seat warmer wasn’t helping much, nor was the vice-grip helmut. I wondered if he had remembered how big my head was before deciding on getting me a size S.

I was grumpy and went home to sleep early. He tried to coax me into a morning ride as well before a brunch date. I said maybe, and then the next morning, it was so beautiful that I convinced myself to ride down to Hermosa Beach to get coffees and watch the surfers.

Sam reentered my life the day I moved to LA. He would be starting a consulting project and would be out here for a few months. After some coordination, he booked the same flight as me from NYC to LA and picked me up in an Uber. Just like that, he was back in my life. Was it a sign or was it a test?

The last time I had seen him was in the northern suburbs of Chicago. It must have been winter 2015. It was cold, and he was out there working on a project for Hertz.

I had been in meetings since 7am, coiffed, prepared, executive. Cold. I kept looking at my phone while talking through meeting agenda points, looking at PowerPoints, and multi-tasking emails. I saw his text. “I’m here.”

I stood up, plugged my headphones into my cellphone, and continued talking while sliding my office door open. I was like a goldfish in there. I had to be careful what people saw me eat, do, say, and stay as expressionless as possible. I tried to balance on my stilettos and smoothed out my suiting and took a breath and scurried down the hall and down the stairs. Click-clacking on the brown linoleum of the depressing 70s-themed outfitted surroundings of brown, brown, and more brown, I pushed the front door out to the semi-circle after giving them receptionist a half wave and smile while pointing to my phone and mouthing hello.

Click clack. The car, probably some fancy one that my brain would never remember, was there puffing out steam into the cold Chicagoan morning.

Click clack, I approached while still talking into my headphones. The front passenger side window was down. When there was just a step away in me reaching the car, I hit the mute button.

“Hey, did you get it?” I asked in a friendly but matter-of-fact tone.

The nature preserve enshrouded us in silence as the cars streamed by in the distant background on Lake Cook Road. An American flag flapped overhead. My body was coatless and shivering. My heart was numb and resigned.

His brown eyes stood out against the wintry backdrop. I could feel my pupils narrow and my lips tighten as he looked at me sheepishly, his brown eyes searching hoping to lift into a smile. He hoped things would be fine, and I didn’t give a signal either way.

He grabbed a brown paper bag, and I deftly reached to the passenger window to receive it on the other side of the handoff.

I gave him a crooked smile and what I remember in my mind’s eye as a salute. “Hey, thanks,” I said. I turned around and bounced on my stilettos back into the building.

Back in my fishbowl office, I hid behind my monitor and opened the bag, still on my conference call. I looked at the packaging. Plan B. I cut through all the plastic with scissors and extracted the pill, which felt as fruitful and as fruitless as mining oysters for pearls.

Unceremoniously, I took the pill with some Dasani water hoping I wouldn’t get sick. I had a lot to do that day and that week. I had only taken the pill once before, and I had been fine. I crumpled up all the packaging into my bag. And then for a minute, I let myself collapse.

The prattling on the call faded into the background as my thoughts and my heartbeat grew louder in my ears. Why? Why did I let things like this happen to me? I was so angry with myself for what I put up with and what I put myself through. I felt trapped in the fishbowl and in the prison of my own misaligned expectations.

I did what I had never done, and I blocked his number in my phone. This had to stop. Karmically, I had to send the universe a message that I am blocking these kinds of experiences.

I received several emails over the next year or so saying he wanted to talk, that he had something he thought I would want back. We eventually did exchange some text messages after I left my job, and he was riding a motorcycle across the country.

He was never a bad person, just unaware. He was there for me in my dark moments, providing counsel and lending an ear. We went out to nice dinners. On our second date, he asked me to define “love.” I had a bad definition. His was poetic and mature. He told me a story about how his parents were in love in India and defied all castes to get married, and how his mother had saved all the love letters his father had sent her in a box. Love, he explained, is what you feel and experience when the needs of the other person far outstrip what you want for yourself. Love is also about hard work.

OK, he gets it, I thought.

We sat in an empty restaurant, The Green Table, in Chelsea Market long after it had closed. A candle flickered between us. He drove me back home, and I thought at that moment, I could see myself actually liking him in a real way. There was a romantic vibe between us in a 1930s kind of way, not in a 2010s Coffee Meets Bagel kind of way. When we were together, I could hear a gramophone soundtrack in the background, scratches and all.

I generally believe it’s okay to stay friends with exes. But…I need to meditate on that a bit more.