I’ve been watching my friends go through friend breakups and now it’s my turn. I have become so disenchanted, so unenamoured, with him. I have fallen out of love, it has rotted on the tree, I wait for the wasted fruit to thump to the garden floor.
It’s an empty feeling. The last time I fell out with a friend was in high school, and we were both young and didn’t understand each other and if I knew how to hold them the way they needed to be held the way I do now, maybe we would have stayed friends. But my friend is ten years older than me and I thought he was grown up, that he knew.
What’s hard is seeing how you’re perceived in the reflection of someone’s eyes and knowing there’s nothing you can do to make them not see you that way. That for my former friend, people come and people go and that’s life. To be any other way is to be melodramatic. I have so few close friends. I count them on two hands, perhaps even just one. To have someone who knows you, who you ate countless dinners with and smoked endless spliffs with and laughed the kind of laughs that double your body over, simply say ‘I’m doing good’ and move on without you. It is a specific and cruel kind of heart stab. Because you have to be cruel back, at least to their face. You have to make your eyes go vacant and wear your heart like a fist and swallow every feeling to maintain the void between you.
I don’t want to want anyone who doesn’t want me. The first man I knew in my life taught me, is teaching me, the art of letting go. It’s not the art of losing; that’s too hard to master. It’s learning how to let go with grace. I don’t know how to do it. This is it, though, at the ripe age of almost 27, I am going to have to learn how to let go or be dragged or have my hand torn clean off. I don’t want to be torn apart. My mind needs to reconnect to the broken bluetooth of my fingers and prise them off, one by one, do not stick around for the ones who have already abandoned you. Abandoned is a strong word, but so is friend, and I feel ill, nauseous, that I have lost a friend. That he’s revealed a side of himself, has been revealing it, really, and I’ve been choosing not to see it, or at least hoping it wasn’t as bad until finally, last night, he came out of the shadows and I saw his careless face for what it was.
I do not offer my trust readily. I believe it’s something one has to earn through their actions and behaviours. But the day I met this man, I trusted him, because he was living with me, because his actions were more than divine. He watched a queer variety show with me and brought up a bottle of champagne; he made five star risotto; we ate it on the balcony and drank a Sardinian spirit so blue it was purple and played guitar and wrote under the dim London stars. He insisted on cooking and eating together. He taught me how to play chess, 20 years after Katie Harlow tried to show me and I refused to learn. I never beat him at a game, though every time, I came closer. We spoke about love and black holes and went to Istanbul and fought and laughed and debated and listened.
Small cracks appeared over time. How he didn’t understand my mental health when it took a turn. The judgment in his eyes when I took a month’s sick leave. Casual mentions of running to meet his first love if she ever reached out to him, even though he was beginning to see a girl. I hate disloyalty. It disgusts me. His placid face, his calm words, his lack of knowing, disgusted me. I don’t know what to do with this feeling, or how to purge it from my body, or how to move. Tonight, I just feel waves of nausea, waves of sadness, waves of disgust. I feel a jagged edge, a broken bottle, a terror rising, a soft breath blowing the foam back down into the pan.