Once again, I have had that awful experience for which the only true remedy is to stop appearing in public. While dining with my ex-boyfriend and his new boyfriend, someone cheerfully waved to me from across the restaurant. Someone I did not recognize but who struck me as familiar. Someone, I feared, I had slept with and immediately forgotten. I sent back a jaunty wave, a "sure I recognize you, you old son of a gun" wave, and then hid behind my ex-boyfriend and his current boyfriend, both to rack my pockmarked memory and to discourage the familiar stranger from approaching.

I could not conjure an image of him nude, which meant that I had likely not seen him in my bedroom or at the gym. I also could not think of any other venues from which he seemed familiar, and the unpleasant suspicion dawned that I was having that other awful experience, that in which I was responding when he was actually waving to someone behind me.

I was on the verge of fleeing the establishment in horror when the light grudgingly dawned. It was the ex-boyfriend of my other ex-boyfriend, Joel. Once they were ex-boyfriends, Joel's ex-boyfriend once sent over a note with a waiter asking me on a date while I was sitting with my other ex-boyfriend, who at the time was my current boyfriend. The note said that I had a nice smile, an assertion I viewed with suspicion. Nonetheless, my then-current (now ex) boyfriend insisted for some mysterious reason that I attend the date with my ex-boyfriend's ex-boyfriend, which would have been the most boring evening ever if I did not learn that my ex-boyfriend's ex-boyfriend was the current AA partner of a man who stalked me before I met my other ex-boyfriend. The fact that the stalker also had a boyfriend was a plot twist that only serves to complicate the retelling.

Thank goodness the ex-boyfriend of my ex-boyfriend who was the AA partner of my stalker (who also had a boyfriend) did not come over to say hello as I dined with my other ex-boyfriend and his current boyfriend as a way to kill time while my current boyfriend is working in Minneapolis.

I had forgotten his name, you see, and the introductions would have been a bitch.