It was about this time 16 years ago that I started talking with my second ex-wife. We’d chatted briefly five years earlier, but she shut things down immediately.

And so when what happened happened, neither of us was in the mindset to fully process it. I was technically still married, and she wasn’t exactly single.

As I’ve gone into excruciating detail before, no need here. The Cliff’s Notes version is a lot of random shit happened in short order that rose to the level of weather causing us to meet.

Having spoken on the phone the night before, we confirmed my intent and need. I had an ex who’d gotten me a hotel room in Tacoma, Wash., but she reserved it starting Sunday night, and the friend I was crashing with moved the “out this weekend” goalposts from EOD Sunday to Friday.

I harbour no ill will toward him … I’d overstayed the original “couple of weeks,” so no issue there. I was able to crash with a former coworker for a night Saturday, which is where the phone call happened.

See, the issue was an ice storm on I-5. This simply doesn’t happen; way too far west, but here we are.

So, driving up the 5 to Tacoma was unacceptably risky. And the woman I’d been talking to for a week lived on the South Coast of Oregon, which wouldn’t be much warmer, but above freezing.

But what led to this improbable situation was how we immediately interacted. She was prickly for the first couple of rounds of messages, but then she somehow softened. I believe there’s a term, tsundere, for this.

She was a hardened bitch (I don’t say this derogatorily; she will happily admit as much herself) who didn’t understand why she even said yes to my random ask.

One night. No funny business.

That fell apart almost comically in a few stages; needless to say, we ended up … well, the first time was awkward because no one was there for that!

The problem is, we’d touched (her idea) while watching The Neverending Story, a movie her son was named after the main character of and also the first one I remember seeing as a child (it would later inform my preference for electronic music), and it happened to be in the place I would eventually come to revere to the point that it was my last physical address before everything fell apart and I was at her door.

States away.

I’ll eventually write a book with all the details, but I’m not here to provide a history lesson; I’m here to talk about next Tuesday.

Because it is now tentatively planned, nine years after our divorce, that I visit for a couple of days. She brought it up this time, so my homelessness wasn’t the motivating factor.

My dad dying a couple of weeks ago and her talking with my mom for the first time in years likely softened her stance.

I’m of two minds. At this point of mental chaos, between the death and other tangible problems, a couple of days with the person who knows me better than anyone else sounds really appealing.

Fiction, but we know it is. Her boys would not countenance me in her bed. And we have a two-day window, which she has opened.

It’s a bizarre situation. Hell, just finally getting along for hours at a time on the phone after so many years was unexpected.