Elephants.

Because life likes to make things awkward, I of course have to see him every week-- at least. We sit next to each other at our weekly board meetings.  It's been almost six months sense we were O-V-E-R but we, in my opinion, have adjusted quite well pretending like nothing ever happened. Oh, and I must mention that I am now dating someone new. 

The president of our board announced that I had "something really exciting to tell everyone!!" It had all to do with my responsibilities on the board, and nothing at all to do with my personal life.

Someone exclaimed, "Are you engaged?!?!" which then started a ripple effect of gasps, "you're engaged??"'s and other hullabaloo. 

And then an elephant walked into the room and sat right next to me and said "ex". 

I could feel him squirming in his seat, and I felt similar. He stared down at the table and didn't look up at all while the commotion went on. I could feel the distress radiating off of him. All of my hard work avoiding the subject of "new boyfriend" in front of him just flew out the window in about one minute. I felt so awful trying to imagine how uncomfortable he must have felt at that moment. I never had intentions to rub it in that I now was dating someone who was not him.  I quickly tried to defer the subject away from my personal life and back to business matters, telling everyone that I was not engaged.

I was SO close to passing him a note but I was not sure if it was just make things worse, so I didn't. Plus what would I have said?... "Sorry that everyone was asking if I was engaged to someone who is not you because we are not dating anymore and things just got extra awkward because it was not that long ago and we didn't ever have closure with it all and things didn't end as well as they could have with us." 

 Instead I gave the elephant some peanuts and sent him on his way.