The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

- Oscar Wilde

I was feeling homesick for Canada and all things Canuck early last month, which as any North American dressed in a tuque for pond hockey will tell you was around the time for Canadian Thanksgiving. But with no turkey, stuffing or pumpkin pie in sight, I went looking for a little home comfort in the CBC and Radio-Canada sites as well as a few Canadian blogs.

Stumbling upon a Québécois one, I could hear that familiar twang and drawl come through in the writing and it brought back a flood of memories, and of course they included certain people. So I got to thinking that since I’m now on Facebook, why not see if any of they are there too?

Big mistake.

Because now I’m tempted to send a message to Nicole, a Québécois woman who dumped me more than 20 years ago. Her name is very common so I had to scroll through a few pages, but when I saw her picture, I knew it was her. Maybe a little puffier around the edges, but otherwise still the same.

We had been living together in our 14th-floor apartment for little more than six weeks when one day she said, “I think we both have to face up to the fact that we’re just not compatible. We have to break up.”

It wasn’t out of the blue. I could see there were problems germinating even before she started hanging out with her friends all the time instead of with me, and soon I was doing the same, both of us avoiding the inevitable.

The endgame was difficult and painful, but at least I learned who my real friends were. Like Max, who helped me move, offered tea and sympathy and beat me sometimes at Scrabble in French, as I beat him once in a while at squash. Or Brad, - gay as they come in Vancouver and sick of all my hetero turmoil - who said one day: Ian, to hell with it. Just ditch the bitch and make the switch.

Didn’t switch, though I did fight a lot, eventually giving up and moving on, the stained fabric of her memory faded yet interwoven with a time I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself.

A generation ago this temptation to contact someone again would never even have come up. You’d move, change phone numbers, avoid people they hung out with, places they’d go, and even if you lived in the same city, that would have been it. You’d never have had to see them again, unless, too late diving into the frozen food aisle, you’d be forced to spend a couple of awkward moments at the supermarket.

Yeah, not much. You? OK, uh… see you.

Now she might be living on the other side of the world, but because contact is only two clicks away, why not? It’s not as if I had to devote weeks of intensive research and detective work into tracking her down, so I won’t come off as having some ulterior motive, sinister or otherwise.

But why, 21 years after a woman pushed me out of her life, do I even feel the slightest pull to do this? Is it mere curiosity, or is something else at work? Is it the desire to say, See? I was a bit of a lost soul back then, OK, but I’m not anymore? Why should she care? Why should I?

And what is it about the temptation to contact her, but not others? The three pricks who called me Chicken Bones and shoved me around all the time in Grade 8 gym class because, having skipped a grade, I was a year younger than they were and a hell of a lot weaker? Canada’s most toxic waste dump / flute player? The no-talent colleague from my Hong Kong TV days who blatantly tried to use our so-called friendship to bolster her relentless career ambitions, and, when I refused to give her a crash course in Economics 100 from Adam Smith through stock markets to the Federal Fucking Reserve, had a screaming, arm-waving histrionic shit-fit in a newsroom packed with gaping journalists, later topping it off by spreading vicious lies about me?

Not that I harbour a life-long grudge or anything, but I’d sooner be strapped naked to a massive block of ice and let a pair of starving ferrets chew through my eyeballs to the back of my skull than see so much as a blurry thumbnail of these losers again, let alone waste a nanosecond searching for them on Facebook.

But how about this:

Salut Nicole!

West End Vancouver, summer of Expo ‘86? Four months of fun and three months of none? How are you? Are you still nursing? In case you’ve ever wondered what became of that guy who didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life, here’s a short update for you. I quit wasting my time with that awful job with those awful people, went skiing for a while and kicked around a bit, left Vancouver two years later to live in Montreal, went back to school for journalism, worked as a reporter in Sherbrooke and Hong Kong, where I met my wife and where my daughter was born. We’ve been living in Hamburg, Germany for the past decade. I’m still in media and still enjoying it. Hey, guess what? That post-university quarter-life crisis I was going through when you knew me? It now has its own label, website, support group and everything! And you can now - perhaps too easily - get ahold of old girlfriends on Facebook, but believe me: I hesitated a long time before hitting the send button.

I don’t know. I might do it, but then again, just because the Internet has rendered effortless something which was impossible only a few years ago doesn’t make it worthwhile.

© 2007 lettershometoyou