This Is Not a Love Story
This is not a love letter. This isn't a love story — or at least, not like that. This is a disjointed personal essay that is sort of a love story, but not in the way you're expecting.
I say that because I want you to know. When you read it, you'll know it's about you, and I want to be clear.
I don't remember how we met. Funny, right? You have been, at various points in time, one of the most important people in my life, and I can't remember how I met you, or when. I can't even remember the year. I'm a date person — I'd argue that dates are important, that we have to remember things like this — and I don't remember when I met you.
It must not have felt important at the time.
I remember when I gave you my phone number. It was a bad time — there was a lot going on, and you sent me a message. A DM, through Twitter, I think. (The details are, of course, lost to time.) Text me, you said, and I laugh-cried, sitting in a booth of a shitty taqueria in some town you'd never heard of, and sent you a text saying something like, hey, it's me, I think my life is fucked up.
You asked if I was okay, and I said no.
You asked if you could help, and I said no.
Finally, at a loss, you offered to send me flowers, and I said no, if you want to send me anything, send me a cactus, that's how I'll know you're serious about being my friend, so you sent me a fucking cactus, instead, and I think that's when I knew I could love you.
(This still isn't a love story. I just want you to remember the cactus, and laugh, because it was funny, and thoughtful, at the time, and sometimes I think you need to hear these things about yourself, that you are capable of being funny and thoughtful and a good egg. I can picture the raised eyebrow when you read that line — if you read it — wondering why I called you an egg. Because, friend, I could picture that face, and it made me smile.)
I fucked up and told you I loved you a few months later.
I think we can gloss over this part, or at least, I want to pretend that we can. It's been almost a decade; you and I have both long since moved on. I can talk about this part without wanting to cringe and throw myself off the nearest bridge; I imagine that you are able to handwave and be gracious about the entire fucked-up mess that was that period of my life. (Thank you.)
It's strange, you know? For a long time, I thought that the weird, short, intense bit where I loved you and was absolutely, miserably head over heels for you was going to be the important part. I know that all of my friends got tired of hearing about you, how you didn't love me back the way I wanted you to.
I recognize it as a mistake, now. Looking back, I want to let out a bark of laughter and bury my head in the sand, quietly delete my entire existence, 2012 – 2017, from the timeline. I think, in some ways, I have: the big pieces stay, but the little things have all faded away over time. I can remember the handful of times we managed to meet each other, in the same city at the same time, but I don't remember the small things, not anymore.
(It is better this way, I promise.)
I remember when I told you that I wasn't in love with you anymore. I know, because, in that pre-therapy, had-just-upended-my-life period of time, I wrote you an email to tell you so.
(I feel that I can defend this, if I sit and think about it. If I re-read it — thank you, Gmail, for your embarrassing, flawlessly executed search function! — and realize how sad I was, but it's funnier if we don't talk about the shitty parts, what else was going on with both of us, just about the pretentiousness of it, writing you an email with a subject that was something like, “this is not a love letter”.)
I told you all the reasons I'd loved you, the pieces left behind. And then I told you: I'm glad we can still be friends.
I meant it, and I know I meant it. I don't think you believed me, but that's the way it goes, yeah?
I wrote you and told you I wasn't in love with you anymore, and then I went ahead and got together with the person I did love, the man I'd eventually marry.
I told you about him, after you wrote me a message going, isn't this fast, and then we didn't talk for...a month? Two months? It's one of those things that I don't remember. I remember other stuff from that period of time — the beginning of the relationship, going up to Washington and down to California with friends, visiting Tillamook and buying really good beer, throwing it into the backseat and bouncing on the balls of my feet as I gleefully told my then-boyfriend, now-husband, that even if he could drink beer, he'd hate it, and him laughing with me. I went to DC again, that year. He started the job he's still at now, the grownup one where suddenly he made enough money. I started writing my PhD thesis and somewhere in there I defended it and I defriended you on Steam. (I'm still sorry about that, kind of. We didn't talk there, and you don't need to know how much Stardew Valley I still play.)
I think, if I look back at it, that neither of us knew how to handle that transition period. Previously it had been — whether I liked it or not, I was always at least a little bit emotionally available for you, in a way that I wasn't available for the majority of other people in my life. When I got together with the man I'd eventually marry, I had to close that off. Our friendship had to change. I was afraid to be the one to spell that out, to really drive that boundary home, and so I withdrew a little, and thought, if this is the end of it, this is the end of it.
But it wasn't, was it?
Was it weird, that adjustment period? I don't remember it being weird. Maybe it was. Maybe the transition period was horrible and awkward and I have blocked it out entirely, out of shame and self-loathing. I don't think it was — it was post-graduation-from-therapy, after all. I vaguely remember sending you messages, big long walls of text, just like usual, and getting the occasional wall of text in return, but more often a series of disjointed little missives — one line at a time.
I know that we'd go for weeks at a time without talking, and then we'd pick up like nothing was wrong.
I know that you told me when you got engaged, and you were one of the first people I told when I did, messaging you on shitty 3g from a tent in the middle of the woods.
You told me when you got married, when you switched jobs. I told you when I eloped, when the startup got funded.
Suddenly we were the people that we went to when we had something to celebrate or something to talk about regarding shared hobbies. We were friends. The awkwardness was gone.
It's been gone a while now, hasn't it?
There's one other piece I remember.
Back in the mists of time, when you were perhaps mildly confounded by the idea that I could love you — me! love you! — you asked me if I thought it would last.
I promised I would love you forever.
I know how I meant it then, and I don't love you that way now, but I think that you should know: I still do love you. Not in the way that I meant as a ridiculous 20-something, and I am not asking you to run away with me into the sunset, but as a friend. A good friend, actually, someone who has seen me at my worst and at my best and still thinks that I am neither good nor evil but merely a person, complicated and complex and worthy of talking to, of understanding and compassion.
I love you like a friend.
Everything has changed over time. By my math, we were talking, at least, by 2012. That's nearly a decade now. I think we must have known each other before, that we must have been friends before, but hell if I can remember when. The years have sanded down the rough edges. What I thought were the big important things have been softened and rounded by time. What I thought would be important turned out not to be, and I'm left with this, instead.
If you told me, way back then, that eventually this is how it would be — that I'd be here, now, content with my lot in life, glad that we're still friends and equal parts relieved and honestly happy that it didn't work out, I don't know that I would have believed you. (I mean, likely I would have — I am the eternal pessimist — but I wouldn't have believed that I was happy about it.)
We have grown and changed. I'm glad I still know you.
That's what sticks, the thing that stays.
The other stuff, the parts I don't remember — were they really important at all?
I love you like a friend, and I know you love me like a friend, too.
This is the part that's left behind.
I wouldn't have it any other way.