Official notice: The Januaries shall no longer intrude into February

*Update at the bottom*

I feel as though I'm still dodging little whirlwinds.

It's as though I am just getting my balance back again after being walloped by the now infamous strain of bad luck, and as I tentatively outstretch my arms and take a step, something kicks me sharply in the back of the ankles.

Not enough to make me tumble were I standing solid on two feet, as I normally am, but it is sufficient to make me topple when I'm just regaining my sense of stability.

It is my motto that "Life gets in the way sometimes", but right now, I wish life would just relegate itself to the sidelines for a few weeks and get the hell out of my way, and let me get my stride back.

As I said, these are whirlwinds, not tornadoes, and thus are relatively miniscule and trivial when contrasted to the overwhelming positive aspects of my life. But they feel like they are darting at me from under the bed, behind the door, from every each direction and I'm not so quick on my feet to be able to dodge them all.

For instance, still feeling a little raw after a night rendered complicated by miscommunications, yesterday evening, I eagerly set myself to preparing for an 80s night extravaganza for a friend's birthday, fishing out big earrings and leggings. In the midst of this, I stopped to check my email.

New message on Facebook. From the Ex's girlfriend.

A little background is probably needed to make sense of this whole scenario.

I spoke of the Ex the post before last... very long term relationship that died a slow, prolonged death that we both pretended not to notice. It was partially a process of negotiating interactions between two people who were likely close to opposites to begin with, and only shifted further to opposing poles as the years passed by. Me? A left-winged graduate student. Him? A blue collared type with more traditional ideas.

I've said before, when things are held to one extreme for too long, sometimes they need to ricochet.

As such, after the obligatory relationship grieving period, I found myself in the arms of a brilliant grad-student-to-be who wrote wonderfully and would spend hours in coffee shops discussing ideas, while he started seeing a bubbly, more traditionally oriented fast food worker 8 years his junior who was dedicated to him with extreme passion.

One of the advantages to a slowly dying relationship as compared to one that collapses in some sort of timely explosion is that there aren't a lot of hard feelings. They have had time to dissipate, especially when you both understand why you no longer fit. As such, while we haven't remained the tightest of friends, him and I have stayed on genuinely good terms. Coffee every three or four months, and a catch-up phone call every month or so. This struck a perfect balance for me-- enough distance to move on, but not so much that someone I had cared about deeply could be considered excised from my life.

But, for her? This wasn't a good balance at all.

Whenever him and I would speak, I would hear tales of her accusation and rage over our continued contact, and her cruel words directed towards me, a woman she'd never met.

A few weeks after coffee with him, in which he seemingly purged himself of all these doubts and frustrations about how he felt trapped in this relationship, leaving me confused as to why a nearly 30 year old man could be so ensnared, I received a message from her on Facebook. An olive branch, it appeared, stating that perhaps a little contact between the two of us might be a good thing. Granted, I was suspicious at first, but over the past 6 months, her and I exchanged friendly messages, simply recaps of what was going on in our lives. Though the whole thing seemed a little odd, it was a lot more pleasurable that the veiled animosity I'd been hearing of before, and I'd come to the conclusion that she was a sweet girl, albeit very naive, and insecure.

However, each time I spoke to the Ex, he would deny this sweetness, and regale me with tales of her jealousy and anger. Tales of them fighting on Christmas Day over me, for instance. And I would get so frustrated at being somehow in the middle of their flawed relationship when I wanted nothing more than for them all to realize that I had moved forward in my life. Eventually, when speaking to him over the holidays, having spent another hour listening to how miserable he was and how controlling she was, I told him, point blank, that he was a grown man, and I was tired of hearing only the negative about her. He had been with her for over a year, so there had to be something positive, some reason he loved her (which he then made a "meh" sound to, as though he wasn't even sure about that) that he was conveniently omitting, or else he was a fool to be in this oh-so-horrible relationship he described-- because each time we spoke, it was the same story, yet, months later, same problems, yet no change.

Last time we spoke, although it was clear they were still together, he didn't mention her, much to my relief.

Then, last night, I received a message from her.

In a nutshell, she asked for my "professional" opinion about the dreams she'd been having. In particular, she'd dreamt that I was in a room, with my Ex, holding a lobster (which was a long standing inside joke between him and I that he'd apparently told her about), mouthing the words "I love you" to him. She then apparently woke up crying and was late for work as a result. She went on to say that she knew that him and I had moved on, but why does she still have these awful dreams, and what should she do about it? She ends off by saying "Please help me Dr. Princess."

What.

The.

Fuck.

I'm not sure what kind of a crazy game I'm being dragged into, or even how I am supposed to respond to something like that.

I know she just wants my reassurance, under the guise of my psychological knowledge, but it is not my job to give it to her.

I don't want to be a pawn in their ongoing relationship drama anymore-- but I think I am morally incapable of writing a mean spirited email to this girl, who is just so very young (in demeanour) and insecure. I don't quite know how to check myself out of all of this.

And these are the whirlwinds nipping at my feet.

*Update-- Although I agree that ignoring may have been the best strategy from a Princess-centred approach, I am unfortunately a sucker at times, and thus chose to reply. Basically, I just told her that there were better people for her to explore this with than me, especially given the Ex's and I's history. She quickly replied and apologized, but with a splash of guilt trip (essentially "I really don't want to have any more of these dreams, so I asked you because you study these things."), and a complement about my appearance thrown in at the end. Hopefully this is the end of it.