if you love something, throw it away....
After lunch, we decided he could take a later train than he’d been planning - the last gasp of the urgency mostly dormant but still alive for the past three years, where I delay boarding the plane (getting on the bus, into the car, onto the train) for just another few seconds, hoarding time, sure that if I just give him another hour (another week, another month, another year…), he’ll finally say something to make it all better and healed and possible again.
He never does. We walked down by the river, wading through snowdrifts & stomping on the cracked, creaky ice coating the dock. We sat side by side on a park bench, held each other and watched giant sheets of ice float slowly past down the Hudson in the clear late-winter sunshine. Talked about serious things, about careers and aging parents and becoming grown-ups and death and destiny. It was a lovely day. Then 4 o’clock came, I walked him to the train platform, long hug, best friend, he touched my face and left.
Something I hadn’t noticed until just now, in retrospect - except for once, slurping milkshakes across from each other at a teeny table for about five minutes -- we never really looked at each other while we were talking. We were always sitting next to - at the pub, on the coffee shop couch, on the bench by the Hudson.
We’ve always been very yin-yang. So different yet so parallel, each containing enough of the other to create our own internal gravity, spinning endlessly around each other, fascinated but opposite and never converging.
I never properly gave myself time to get over him, y'see, just squinched it down & tried to ignore it because I didn't want to miss the chance to be with Shawn. And of course squinching things down only sends them into the pits of your unconscious, where god knows what is going on & you no longer have control over it because you're denying it exists.
And now, that’s done. His new girlfriend posted stuff on his facebook wall (how very non-poetic a catalyst) that hurt when it shouldn't have, and I realized that I need to let this go once and for all. Enough with being one another’s stand-in cement for what’s missing in our current relationships, the neutralizing stop-gap that keeps us in them longer than we should be. If he loves me, if he wants to keep tossing around the word “soulmate,” he can finally do something about it. Or, he can go.
He’s been my best friend for the past four years. We grew up together, and because of each other. There are few people I’m so comfortable around, there are few people who know me so well, there are few people I know so well. This is really difficult.
He didn't take it well when I told him. As Sarah once put it, he’s always been able to fuck with me emotionally more than anybody else I know.
I did all the things yesterday that the breakup manuals told me to do three years ago - delete his number from my cell phone (as though I haven't had it memorized since I was eighteen), de-friend him in every online capacity, stop taking his calls. I want things and people in my life now that have forward motion. With him, it’s become - really, it’s always been - a tug backward. Wistful, idealistic, romanticized and - apparently - impossible. We both need to sink or swim in relationships on our own from now on, without each others’ ghosts lurking in the corners. And that includes our own.
(Funny the way this all makes it sound like I'm sure I'm doing the right thing by throwing away my best friend.)
He never does. We walked down by the river, wading through snowdrifts & stomping on the cracked, creaky ice coating the dock. We sat side by side on a park bench, held each other and watched giant sheets of ice float slowly past down the Hudson in the clear late-winter sunshine. Talked about serious things, about careers and aging parents and becoming grown-ups and death and destiny. It was a lovely day. Then 4 o’clock came, I walked him to the train platform, long hug, best friend, he touched my face and left.
Something I hadn’t noticed until just now, in retrospect - except for once, slurping milkshakes across from each other at a teeny table for about five minutes -- we never really looked at each other while we were talking. We were always sitting next to - at the pub, on the coffee shop couch, on the bench by the Hudson.
We’ve always been very yin-yang. So different yet so parallel, each containing enough of the other to create our own internal gravity, spinning endlessly around each other, fascinated but opposite and never converging.
I never properly gave myself time to get over him, y'see, just squinched it down & tried to ignore it because I didn't want to miss the chance to be with Shawn. And of course squinching things down only sends them into the pits of your unconscious, where god knows what is going on & you no longer have control over it because you're denying it exists.
And now, that’s done. His new girlfriend posted stuff on his facebook wall (how very non-poetic a catalyst) that hurt when it shouldn't have, and I realized that I need to let this go once and for all. Enough with being one another’s stand-in cement for what’s missing in our current relationships, the neutralizing stop-gap that keeps us in them longer than we should be. If he loves me, if he wants to keep tossing around the word “soulmate,” he can finally do something about it. Or, he can go.
He’s been my best friend for the past four years. We grew up together, and because of each other. There are few people I’m so comfortable around, there are few people who know me so well, there are few people I know so well. This is really difficult.
He didn't take it well when I told him. As Sarah once put it, he’s always been able to fuck with me emotionally more than anybody else I know.
I did all the things yesterday that the breakup manuals told me to do three years ago - delete his number from my cell phone (as though I haven't had it memorized since I was eighteen), de-friend him in every online capacity, stop taking his calls. I want things and people in my life now that have forward motion. With him, it’s become - really, it’s always been - a tug backward. Wistful, idealistic, romanticized and - apparently - impossible. We both need to sink or swim in relationships on our own from now on, without each others’ ghosts lurking in the corners. And that includes our own.
(Funny the way this all makes it sound like I'm sure I'm doing the right thing by throwing away my best friend.)