Digging in and digging up

I have wracked my brain the last week, trying to put into words my complex mother issues, having just recently visited her for her birthday. I can't. Stay with me for this one, folks....
Remember Pulp Fiction? It's one of my all time favorite movies, for many reasons, some very obvious, some very personal. Remember the mysterious brief case that seemed to be the focus of much of the movie, albeit wonderfully distracted by the mayhem of dialogue and editing? My mother issues are the contents of that brief case. Every once and a while I have the occasion to crack open that case, and when I do my eyes bug out and my face is bathed in it's dysfunctional golden glow. Slack jawed and without words to begin to describe the depth of horror and guilt and wonderment and ludicrosity, that's right I made up a word - deal with it!, I have to just slowly shut the case and move on. I just can't articulate what it is. All I know is that it is present in me, and it rears it's head on occasion.

One of the main reasons I haven't been able to concentrate on my mother issues is that I was contacted this week by an ex-girlfriend. That's right - there was a time back during the Jurassic Era, when I roamed the boggy lands of the Great Plains, that I dated a girl. In fact, she was kind of the last serious girl I dated before evolving into the wonderfully talented and wise gay you have come to know and love. And she saw me on Facebook and emailed me. And I was kind of rocked back on my heels by it, I have to say.
I don't want to give too much of the juice away, more to protect the dignity of those involved and to allow the past to stay buried, but she was the last big deal, so to speak. I casually dated a girl or two after her, but only for appearances, and I selfishly let everyone around me know that this woman had broken my heart and should never be forgiven for doing so. When I left Omaha, to start a new life in the gay friendly red state of Arizona, I would bring her up in conversation from time to time, as the girl I almost married. The truth is that there was never a ring on her finger. I was saved from that embarrassment before I could actually buy the ring - but I had decided shortly before we broke up that I was going to buy a diamond and get down on one knee and propose to her, and came within days of doing so. At the time, I was way too humiliated to deal, and so I made a huge show of our breakup. Over time, I've come to realize that it was the best thing that probably ever happened to me in my entire life. It cracked the facade that I was trying to construct around me; the facade of the hetero family man that wanted a wife and kids and a house in Dundee. While plausibility is entirely relative to your perspective, I could've continued on that path and been one of those creepy middle aged, church going, kid having, soccer dads who end up in a police raid on the public bathrooms at Elmwood Park. I could've continued ruining life after life with my own denial problems into perpetuity.
But I didn't, because she probably saw what I couldn't, and did something about it. She really did break my heart at the time, but in looking back, I am so eternally grateful she did.
So I wrote her back. And before I was done filling her in on the last 10 years of my life, I asked her to forgive me for being such a shitty gay boyfriend. Just the way I'd practiced over and over in my head all these years. I crossed my fingers and pressed SEND. I hope she doesn't freak and never talk to me again, because I really do dig the idea of reconnecting with that past. That history. That era, shortly after man left the swamp to walk upright, when man had yet to order his first Frappaccino, and cell phones were only found on jailhouse walls.