I actually have an interesting story to tell about former boyfriend. Should I started capitalizing it? In fact, I have about three hundred interesting stories to tell about Former Boyfriend, but I ought to start with the generalities.

How “former” is “Former—?” I haven’t seen him in ten years, and have not known him in the Biblical sense in 12 or 13 (my memory gets fuzzy over some particulars). I was in email contact with him over the past couple of years-very scant, sometimes unfriendly; I offended him once or twice with my opinion on some political matters and/or his marriage. Or perhaps there were different reasons, he’s explained it to me— something about three different kinds of guilt- it was a convoluted explanation and I had trouble grasping it entirely. Anyway, mid-March of this year I received an email stating that he had just finished his twelfth ECT (Electro Convulsive Treatment), had just been released from six weeks in the mental hospital, and that his wife had announced that she is a lesbian. He was also two weeks away from finishing his thesis, which if you would like to read, can be found here:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~blevine/levine_thesis.pdf

That’s right, he’s smart! Very smart, in fact; the smartest person I’ve met in my moderately short life, and that includes every professor I encountered or walked past in college. This man (Former Boyfriend) can read a novel in fifteen minutes, at the rate of roughly one page per second. Plus he wrote a 292 page thesis about “Hybrid Architectures With a Single, Transformable Executable.” So there he was, an almost finished PhD, and he just had his brain fried (literally) 12 times. I received this email from him a short while later:

My day continues to get worse and worse. I am beginning to wonder if the ECT really screwed with my mind. There is supposed to be some risk of some minor and transitory memory problems, but I'm beginning to wonder if it had some worse effects. There is lots of conspiratorial stuff about it on the Internet, but it generally seemed quite safe. I am having some serious memory issues and R--- said it has really effected my personality. We went out to eat and go grocery shopping last night, which was a total fiasco, which was when R--- brought up the personality comment. Today I've found a number of alarming memory issues, like apparently on Friday (the day of my last ECT) I told C--- that I would be back to take over my class today. Not only do I have no recollection of the conversation ever having taken place (apparently a conference call with the department head and the instructor who has been filling in for me), but I didn't even think I had I had agreed that I would necessarily be able to come back to teach the class at all. I had another similar experience in regards to a research contract today, in addition to a plethora of minor memory issues like forgetting streetnames. My confusion about the class ended with me crying on the phone with the undergraduate studies director. My whole job status and pay status is very complicated and uncertain now.

At this point, roughly two months later, his memory seems back—more or less- his personality is still a bit altered, though that is an elusive component to pin down. But what is strangest of all is that the most noticeable, from my perspective, result of his ECT treatments has a complete and open friendliness toward me, contrasted to his previous three-guilt-caused ire. I had tried reaching out to him several times over the past couple of years and it was like reaching out to pet a snapping dog. Suddenly he is a soft, declawed cat who wants to curl up next to me while I read, and I don’t know what to do with him exactly.