by Maggie Voysest

The Men Who Come Back, Those Boomerang Boyfriends… WHY!!

(Today’s title has been brought to you by Brandon)

Gigi just didn’t understand men. She didn’t know why she even still bothered trying. How could one ever figure out what made men tick? Why they do the things they do… Do they even know themselves? Gigi’s friend Ana told her just last week that men have two heads, and invariably think with the wrong one. How true… With time, Gigi could somehow manage to deal with things when they didn’t work out. When things ended badly or well. When they each moved on and went their own separate ways. Not everything was meant to be or last forever. Some affairs of the heart or relationships of the body were temporary. That she understood… maybe. Or maybe not.

What she really didn’t get and never would, were the men who came, left, and then came back. Sometimes they left several times, and kept coming back, and then kept leaving. I’m not talking about just plain booty calls from men met at bars. I’m talking about educated men who said they wanted a relationship. Men on dating websites. Men who swore up and down that they wanted more than just sex. Some of these men who left came back, but not really. Not 100 %. Sometimes not even in person. They kept in touch through one of the many technological inventions that made it possible to communicate without really communicating: texts, emails, phone. They couldn’t stay, but they couldn’t stay away either. WHY?!! If this eternal question could be answered, Gigi would be a very happy woman.

It couldn’t be just for sex. Gigi refused to believe that. These men were good looking men. They could get sex with other women. Gigi wasn’t even the most drop-dead gorgeous woman around (no matter how bodacious her tatas were). It’s not as though only Gigi could give them great sex. Although she did hear many a time, from the men who left, how sorely they missed her many talents, talents that one cannot quite put on a resume, but of course merit a mention on memoirs such as these. No, these men were NOT coming back just for the free milk that they had tossed away months ago. Gigi couldn’t believe that. Not just for the milk. It was a fear of commitment, of something getting too serious. A fear of the future. Some kind of fear known only to men. But not just because they’d been given free milk, got tired of it, or suddenly became lactose intolerant, and then found a miracle pill curing them of the intolerance, so that they now wanted more milk.

Gigi had female friends that told her that men left her because she gave her milk away for free, or because she gave in too quickly; that men wanted the chase, and when they “dun caught the itty bitty liddle filly, they dun got bored, and tossed ‘er out in search fer de next ‘un.” (OMG, please excuse the purposely badly written grammar and spelling mistakes and the atrocious southern accent). Gigi had female friends who gave that milk away the first night, and were still together months later (Kelly and boat guy still going strong, thank you very much). She had female friends who made them wait for the milk, and they ran away before they got it (just keep reading Helen’s chapters and you will see what I mean). Of course, she also had female friends who gave the milk away quickly and were left their heads spinning in confusion at the “now-here-now-gone” situation.

No. These men kept coming back to Gigi for a reason that had nothing to do with milk. She’d been told many a time that once she was out of their lives, they’d realized just how much they’d missed her. Or that they’d met someone else, and they’d compared her to Gigi and found the new woman sadly lacking. That they couldn’t forget Gigi, no matter how hard they’d tried. “Unforgettable” she’d been called by more than one man. I guess that’s a nice thing to be remembered as. But then WHY LEAVE??!! Maybe they had to leave to realize that she really was that unforgettable? A new face book friend, Keith, recently told her that maybe men at times realized that they’d had something good, and they came back to apologize, and to try to get a second chance at happiness with Gigi. Another friend, Renee, quoted Joni Mitchell who said, “ Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”

Then there was Brandon, who gave Gigi invaluable advice just today. He is an old college friend, recently found on face book (and one of few happily married people that Gigi knows). In fact, he was one of the very first guys Gigi (known as Frankie in those days, go figure) met that very first week at Michigan State. He appropriately called these come-back men “boomerang boyfriends.” Boomerang boyfriends!! What a great term… He also told Gigi that “guys do need to be slapped upside the head from time to time” and that maybe they’d had a sudden epiphany and realized that they had f#*^’ed up and needed to fix things. Gees, it was so nice finally getting the male perspective. It really helped a lot more than hearing other women trying to figure men out. Men must know what other men are thinking better than women, right? Thanks Brandon. We’ll find a gorgeous actor to play your part in the movie.

Is that what it was? Realizing what you had only once you’d lost it? Lost? What a strange word choice. Gigi always lost things: hair clips, umbrellas, hats, scarves, gloves, and those gosh darned socks that went into the washing machine in pairs, and came out alone and lonely. But she’d never lost a man on purpose. Nope. When she had a man, she took very good care of him, filling all his needs, feeding all his hungers. She never turned around and wondered to herself just where she’d placed that wonderful, albeit sometimes maddening man. She didn’t lose phone numbers. She didn’t forget dates or anniversaries. She definitely never fell asleep on them or arrived late for any date with a man. So why did so many men “lose” her and then come back weeks, months, sometimes years, later?

Because there were lots of them. Gigi had run to her written memoirs and actually counted them, suddenly curious as to the exact number. She found out that: four men came back years later, thirteen came back months later, and four came back just weeks later. And that was just off the top of her head. I’m quite sure she has forgotten some of them. Men who come back. Some once very important men to Gigi. Some not so important, because they had run away too soon, or hadn’t touched her heart, just her body. Funny, but it was the ones who came back years later that had been the most important ones, and the ones with whom it almost worked out the second time. Almost but not quite.

But Gigi really wanted to know why these men kept coming back to her, and why she kept giving them another chance. I know she’s said before that she didn’t forgive men once they left, but that’s not really true, now is it? If you know Gigi as I know Gigi, you’d know by now that there is way too much trust and hope and naivete still within her, which almost always has her give these men another chance. “All men deserve a second chance,” she’d tell herself. Especially the men she’d cared about, even if they’d left her. Those she readily and easily forgave, and let back into her life. She truly thought that they must have realized that the world was a cold and lonely place without her, and she thought that they must have missed her just as much as she’d missed them. That maybe things were better the second time around. Now up until now, this had never been the case. That second time never seemed to work. But at least Gigi never gave up hope that this second chance might one day work in her favor. At the very least, she would never be left wondering what could have happened with so-and-so, if she’d just given him another chance. She’d never have to face that regret that some of her friends had gone through.

She had to give them one more chance. No matter how much they had hurt her in the past. Gigi never thought of that for more than a brief infinitesimal second. Like Scarlett, Gigi would simply tell herself that she’d think about that tomorrow, that tomorrow was another day. But that today, HE was back, and wasn’t it simply wonderful, and wasn’t life just grand, and hadn’t she been waiting breathlessly for just such a moment? There had been a few in Gigi’s past who had made her heart go skippity-skip with instant joy when they suddenly and unexpectedly, with no warning at all, reappeared in her life.

And off she would go, merrily skipping along a flower-filled path (a path, a path… oops sorry, another Monty Python moment), prancing down an optimistic lane into a glorious yesterday, one that promised a better tomorrow. She’d have about one milli-second of disbelief and thoughts of ignoring them. But after years of thinking about these men and wondering where on earth they’d ended up, and what had become of their lives, how could one ignore them when they reappeared? “Written in the Stars” a truly sad song by Elton John and LeAnn Rimes, that always made Gigi cry and think of the men she’d loved and lost, said it beautifully:

“A word or two, and then, a lifetime of not knowing where or how or why or when, you think of me, or speak of me, or wonder what befell, the someone you once loved so long ago, so well.”

So how could someone who cried at that song, ignore an email that appeared totally out of the blue, that said she was “Unforgettable” like the one sent by Robbie, her first online experience, and once upon a time high school boyfriend? How to ignore an email from Daniel, her other boyfriend from high school and the man she’d almost married and was with for almost seven years, when he said how happy he was to have re-found her, and that he’d never stopped thinking about her? How could she have ignored her first lover ever Paco, when he told her in person that he’d been a fool to break up with her a few years ago, and would she please just give him a second chance? How could she have hung up the phone on Ben, the marine she’d been engaged to in college, the one who sent her a Dear John letter when he was involved in the Gulf Wars, and then found her new number at college and called her a year later, telling her that no other woman had come close to making him feel the way Gigi had?

To all these men she gave a second chance, happily and without regret, no regrets, not even now looking back on those days, even though the second time around fared as badly as the first time. They were all men whom Gigi had loved. Truly loved. They were all men who had loved Gigi, even if that love might have faded with time. She’d never regret a single minute spent with them, nor a single tear shed when they were gone for the second time.

As for the others, well, some got a second chance and some just didn’t. Five other, not so important men, had tried to come back into Gigi‘s life, but she’d outright told them that no, it simply wasn’t going to happen. They just hadn’t done it for her the first time around, or else some now had girlfriends, or she just plain didn’t trust them anymore. Yes. It might take Gigi a while, but at times she did learn her lesson, and learned who to stay away from. She knew from experience that she couldn’t trust sweet, gorgeous Abi, that French-speaking con artist from a past chapter. The other four she hasn’t even written about yet, because that’s how boring and uninteresting they ended up being. Gigi wants to entertain with her memoirs, not put her faithful readers to sleep!

Three others, who could have become important, but never gave it a real chance, just flirted by text, email, or face book, saying that they wanted to see her again, but would never commit to an actual date. They seemed to enjoy the long distance communication, and even though Gigi would have happily met them again for a fun romp in bed, they never delivered what they promised. They could never be pinned down to a specific time and place. Gigi soon grew tired of their games, and said that this technological flirting with men who lived just a few miles away was not her cup of tea. It was one thing to have phone sex and a long distance relationship with someone who lived thousands of miles away, but when they lived less than half an hour away, and they only wanted to sex text, then there was something seriously wrong with them. They were turning down the real thing!! Gigi was not a rental video that they could pop in, watch while they played with whatever men play with when watching these videos, and then run along their merry way. No siree!! So she soon gave up on Vinnie, Karl, and Charlie (from past Gigi chapters, in case you want to go back and find them).

So how many men does that make? 4 plus thirteen plus four plus five plus three? Gigi gave up after the second set of numbers. Like that mathematical problem on how fast the train is going, divided by the amount of miles to go, and multiplied by the speed of light in inner space. Those problems always give Gigi a splitting headache. Give her a nice complicated language to learn, and leave those math problems to the math geeks. She had recently told a student who was in tears after failing a Spanish test that he shouldn’t feel bad. That everyone is good at something and bad at other things, and that though she was a teacher and an adult (hush, no snickering or outright laughter now), she still had to count on her fingers, and if she ran out of fingers, then she was just plain out of luck. He looked at her in amazement and smiled, wiping away his tears. Gigi told him that she spoke six languages, and yet totally sucked at math, and he proudly told her that he was great at math, gave her a hug, and promised to study for his retake test. Ah Gigi… what a touch she had with her students!! Now THEY never ran away from her, and remembered her fondly even many, many years later. They never lost her!!

As to why she gave some another chance? Of those thirteen men who did come in and out of Gigi’s life, it was normally just a sexual thing. A great sexual experience that she totally didn’t mind repeating, as no one was hurt by it, and enjoyment was found by both parties, because, darn it, at times the sex between them was THAT good. It was hard finding really good sex, and Gigi didn’t like looking for strangers in bars. Contrary to what it may seem like after having read all these chapters, Gigi didn’t enjoy one-night stands that went nowhere. She wanted to find a man with whom she could have fun and great sex, if not love, and hold on to that relationship, even if purely sexual. But somehow something always seemed to go wrong, and the men always seemed to leave. At times it was Gigi’s fault that they left. At times, it wasn’t.

Which brings us to last week. Thanksgiving week. What perfect timing. Time to give thanks for a Gigi in your life? Because Gigi suddenly heard from four men from her past. FOUR!! Are the Gigi stars aligned up there somewhere? Is she going to have to figure out the physics on the relationship between the speed of light and falling stars crashing upon her head? Once again, as Mary often said, there was either a man drought in Gigi’s life or a flood of them. She happily texted away with all four of them, practically at the same time, this time with no monumental text mess-ups on her Iphone, thank God, especially since one of those reappearing men was her Le-Ro from Chapter 1, the one to whom she had sent the wrong text and lost for a while. Hmmm, I guess Gigi did lose men at times, through some technological fault not totally her own… But sexy Le’Ro was far away, and not supposed to come into town till the New Year.

Another one of these four said he missed her bodacious tatas, that he always nicknamed “the boys.” Is that a weird name? To name something so female, something so male? He’d been email flirting with her for almost two years without ever having seen her again in person. But when she looked him up on face book, she saw he had an oh-so-cutesy photo of himself with another woman, proof that his oh-so important city job hadn’t stopped him from developing a relationship after all, eh tu Vinnie!!

There was yet one more, her sweet and sexy Walt, with whom Gigi had had a special year long booty relationship. He, too, answered her Happy Thanksgiving text and told her he missed some of her very special talents (even though she had sent him to the doctor once). He told her that he was sorely tempted to come back to Gigi. But he ended up by saying that he had to stay strong and resist temptation, since he was not free to come back to her. Gigi had to feel admiration for him for that. Regret too, of course, since he ranked in the top five of her best sexual experiences ever, but he blamed it on Gigi saying that she had gone to Spain and picked up her sailor, instead of coming back to him to give it another try. Well, how the heck was she to have known that he had really meant it when he told her they should try to date, and not just revert to plain booty? She’d thought he’d been kidding, and then she’d met Julian her sailor (who yes, also tried several times to get back into Gigi’s life through email/webcam/phone, and yet couldn’t rent a fricking car and drive ten fricking hours to see her when he was finally stateside… oops yet another mad digressing Gigi moment)

And now we come to the most important one to suddenly reappear in Gigi‘s life. In a very long time that is. One whom she almost fell in love with just five months ago. One who told her that he loved her, and then disappeared without a word. Here one minute, gone the next. No explanation. They were together for almost two months, and then he just left. Gigi’s first Mr. Brown, Niles, the one once called the “lying spineless creep“, that sexy bald, tattooed, British sleep technician, who’d charmed his way into Gigi’s life and then left. Gigi had sent him emails, texts, and phone calls, asking him just to let her know what had happened. He never answered a single one. He never even read the messages she left on the dating site where they met. The messages she left were first chatty, then slightly worried, then confused, then hurt, then almost angry, and then back to confusion (yes, the six Gigi steps of WTF). Until this Thanksgiving. When she decided, who knows why, to give it one more try, and she sent him a very simple Happy Thanksgiving text. All she knew was that she couldn’t forget him. That she couldn’t stop asking herself what had happened, and how he’d gone from a tender “I love you” to cold silence.

And so she texted him. For the first time in over a month (God yes, all right, so she’d sent one each month since he‘d left!! So what!! It worked, didn’t it?), This time, he actually answered, and she nearly dropped her green bean casserole (yes, can you imagine a Spanish chick making green bean casserole to take to her ex-husband’s family dinner? Gigi still went to all their holidays and parties, and somehow that became her dish to bring). All I will say as I conclude this chapter, is that they texted every day after Thanksgiving, talked on the phone, and made a date to see each other just a week later. Nope. No more clues (unless you’ve peeked at her face book statuses for the past week). This is one chapter that Gigi doesn’t want to start writing until she knows what happens when she sees him. Ok, we all know WHAT will happen. The important thing, is what will happen after that? Will Niles stay? Or will he go? Will Gigi’s memoirs draw to a close and become sappy happy blogs on her life with him? Gigi just asks you to cross all your fingers and toes, wish on as many falling stars as you can see, and send her all the luck in the world that she so deserves. And maybe, just maybe, you will see the happy completion of “The Adventures of a Thoroughly Confused Gigi” with a final Chapter 25, entitled, The Man Who Fell in Love and Stayed That Way…

No more till next week. Gigi has to finish running around and cleaning her house, throwing things in closets, doing dishes, finish cooking the meal that she knows this man won’t miss, and trying to get at least a few hours of sleep… wait, didn’t this happen the first time Niles came to her house five months ago? May second chances work this time…

To read Part XXV, see The Adventures of a Thoroughly Confused Gigi – Part XXV