Stalking Josefina Lopez

One of the valuable things about keeping a journal or having friends along with you on the journey of life, is that you can go back and get a different perspective on past events, perspectives that sometimes diverge astonishingly from how you remember things. So often you go back to find you were actually the hero in a story where you've always cast yourself as the villain, or you were a cad when you thought you were a saint, or you thought you were the star when you were just an extra, fit to swell the progress of a scene or two. Even the things you remember most vividly are nothing more than a few sparkles in a lump of meat inside your skull.

Josefina's version of our past isn't wholly true, and neither is mine, but between us, we seem to have pooled our sparkles of memory into a truth we can more or less agree on. I may actually go see Real Women Have Curves again, not just because my ex-girlfriend co-wrote it and because I'm maybe sorta kinda in it, but because Josefina seems to have blossomed into an actual writer, and I'm proud of her for how far she has come.

After all these years, I have put my arch-nemesis to rest by making her—in my mind, at least—into a friend. And in the end, isn't that the only way you can ever really do it?