Ex-lovers and friends

So I have a friend who, when discussing her recent exes, always brings up that she wants to be friends with them after the dust has settled, not like my situation with J (just-the-letter J, not J******) where he keeps trying to hang out with me and I want nothing to do with him. I finally felt the need to clarify that I don't want nothing to do with him because we dated, I want nothing to do with him because...looking back on that chapter of my life, I have no idea why I EVER wanted anything to do with him. I like to call him all-the-rebellion-that-was-supposed-to-infest-my-teenage-years-balled-up-into-7-weeks. 

What I didn't remind her of, though, is that he's not the only ex I have, not the only situation for her life to be compared with. *sigh* We were laughing yesterday at a Yahoo article that said one of the worst New Year's Resolutions to make was to quit Facebook, because everybody uses Facebook. That's...not exactly true. More and more recently, I've found myself desperately wanting to Facebook-stalk one person I can't: my first ex, the one none of my friends like to talk about because they think I was being ridiculous about the whole situation. I'm not going to go through the whole thing again: he's been talked about before. I don't tell people this, but every time I'm home I hope I'll randomly bump into him at the mall or Wal-mart or somewhere. When I'm bored and randomly clicking around on facebook waiting for something interesting to happen in someone's life, I sometimes type his name into the search box just to see if he reactivated his profile, because I want to know what's going on in his life more than I care to admit. 

Don't ask me why. I don't know. I don't want to get back together with him, not in the slightest. I meant what I said in that tear-filled phone call from freshman year, and I will not retract those statements. But I hate that not wanting him romantically means I can't have him at all. I hate that I miss the way I feel when I'm with him, because I'm almost positive that what I'm missing is the naivete and sense of endless possibilities that encompassed the entire time we were close, but even more so I hate that we can't be friends. He has faded nearly entirely into person-I-once-knew status, and dammit, I want to know him. But sometimes that decision isn't ours to make.