Is friendship really possible after the good of a romance has gone? And if so, how exactly do you begin to be friends without falling into the trap of being more than that? What would be the defining parameters? What can you, and can’t you expect from either side?
“Why don’t you call, when you say you will? Is it because I don’t belong to you anymore?” sings Rachael Yamagata. She sings my sentiments, but I also do know that I can’t oblige him to do that, or even be upset when he doesn’t.
“Why don’t you come? Don’t you miss me at all?” Rachael’s smoky voice wafts through the nebulae of my mind. He said he was due to arrive today, I look at my phone’s inbox to read his message to confirm, and there it is, a timebomb of a date. I waited for it to blow up, but the explosion, a message to ask me to see him never comes.
Has he forgotten? Was he just too busy? Or did he not want to see me again? But more importantly, why am I still waiting? Why am I worried that I won’t see him? If he is just a friend, then I would be fine even if we go without seeing each other for months. It wouldn’t matter.
But I am a liar. It does matter to me if he calls. I count the days leading to his arrival. I imagine what I will be wearing, his reaction when he sees me, the conversation we’ll have over dinner, the banter, the now chaste kiss goodnight.
Rummaging through things that are not mine, I see it. An email advising he won’t be able to make it for the appointment. His schedule is too tight. He is needed somewhere, someplace else.
Yet I need him here. And his place is as vacant as the memories that we are supposed to make. His absence is a hole, a tear in this precarious reality I conjure. His silence is loud and screaming.
“We can only be friends now,” I told him. “This is friendship or nothing,” I voiced an ultimatum. He complies, and I hate him for doing so.
I may have lied, but I lied for a good reason. I want something real with him. And what we had before, though he may argue otherwise, was far from real to me. “Just because you label this differently from me, doesn’t mean it’s nothing to me. It’s just semantics,” he told me before.
But I didn’t believe him. How could I? Intellectualizing this whole affair, he was. Semantics, my ass.
So I gave the ultimatum, in the belief that if I pushed him towards the side of friendship, then I would finally have something real, something honest. Something I can hold.
It is a lie. And sadly, it is only I who believe it.
