This Is Why We Will Never Be Just Friends

I could spend my life summing up what we meant to each other when we were together.  I could write endless pages, yet, still, never find the exact words to truly convey what once was. I liked to think that those sorts of things are only meant to be felt in that place, at that time. They can’t simply be recreated in some foolish essay posing as a poetic declaration of love. Maybe that’s why it’s so impossible to recall it years later. While I can remember feeling an intensity with you that was unlike any other, I couldn’t say now what caused it, or, more importantly, when it disappeared.

But it did. We turned our backs on what we were and decided we were better off on our own. The uneasiness I felt was not because it didn’t work out. Our departure was simply a natural progression of being separated. Physically, emotionally. I walked away reassured that you put in the effort when it mattered, a time when we had some value. Things begin and end every moment of every day.

Some sooner than anticipated, others dragging out for far too long. I vowed to give you the space you needed and to cut ties so you could have the freedom you so desired. But instead of closing the door, you kept it unlocked. You kept the line open, lingering above me awaiting the moment when I finally felt whole again to barge in and disrupt the healing I had so fully committed to. The letters and calls that followed were filled with your ludicrous claims that we could still be a part of each other’s lives.

It’s not the manner in which you left, but the way you forced it to remain unfinished. By avoiding closure, you could continue to hang onto the remnants of us as they crumbled before you. But, you must know, the unbearableness of ending things didn’t mean we should turn it into something else so we could still be together in another sense. It was simply validation that what we had was valuable, meaningful, significant.

You continued to push pieces together in a way they weren’t meant to fit…as if a friendship could live up to the expectations of adoration that once seeped out of us. And maybe, possibly, replace the ounce of love that inadvertently got mixed up in there. I might never understand why you’d turn something rooted in sincerity and twist it into an object of the mundane. Discounting what we had by diminishing it to a friendship was doing a disservice to love everywhere. I’d rather you remember me as once being everything you needed, instead of something so ordinary, so trivial.

Regardless, I don’t want you to take this wrong. It scares me to even think of losing you completely. Because of this I continue to try to understand your intentions. It’s a stinging notion to think that perhaps you have a point. The only reason we can’t be friends is because of my own inadequacies.  But moderation was never our strong suit, we lived in extremes. Our constant need to renegotiate our boundaries simply reinforced that we didn’t have any. To act as friends was out of our control, nearly to the realm of impossibility. And that’s all it would be, an act.

Perhaps we will always be so many things for each other, forever that person who won’t subside. Thoughtful memories, standards of affection, a point of necessary growth and, consequently, recovery. Friends, however, will not be one of them.