bury it
It was late on a Friday afternoon, the week first week of summer vacation, when he messaged me:
The consortium has requested your presence this evening.
Oh, really? I responded, And this consortium, this is something you concocted, consisting of only you?
Irrelevant. And it’s less of a request, more of a demand. You in or out, Len?
In, always in when it came to him.
Len isn’t my name. It was a nickname for a nickname, complete nonsense to anyone but the two of us. The way he spoke to me sometimes, it was as though we had a secret language. I wasn’t sure how or when it had happened, but he’d become one of my closest friends.
We stayed out all night that night and watched the sunrise on our way home. (The sun peaking through the downtown skyline is still one of my favorite things.) He turned on Peter Gabriel, a departure from his usual choices, and something in his expression let me know not to question it.
“It reminds me of my dad,” he shared, a rare moment of vulnerability.
The next night he took me to the Tearoom to see our favorite band.
And the day after that he wrote: Spider, you’ll trap me. Even though I’m a fly I will let you because it’s an agonizingly appealing existence.
***
In July the two of us went on a road trip to Illinois, camping and watching bands. Ten days of music, conversations, and companionable quiet with one of my favorite people. Time had a way of expanding and contracting when I was with him. There was never enough of it, but somehow it also slowed, giving me the ability to clearly remember details that may have otherwise been lost. At night we would sit together in our camping chairs, watching the stars, until sleep became inevitable.
He’s a friend, just a friend. I reminded myself again and again throughout the trip. Why risk ruining something good?
***
In August he insisted on driving me down to Lake Travis, knowing that work prevented me from leaving earlier with the rest of our group. There was one particular moment, filled with Starflyer and golden hour sunlight - the windows were down, my hair was whipping around my face - and he looked over at me with those green eyes of his. I wondered how much longer I could lie to myself.
Just Friends. It was no longer true.
We are something new now. Something in between.
***
The two of us were sitting at the Ethiopian/Italian restaurant that we loved when our casual conversation took a turn.
“You intimidate me… Your view of the world makes me feel infantile.”
I didn’t know how to take the compliment or what it’s significance was in the bigger picture. I wished he wouldn’t read more into me than what was there, or think that I was intimidating. I wished he would say what he meant. I wished he wouldn’t tease quite so much.
“It’s charming when I tease you,” he argued.
“You’re charming when you’re nice,” I countered.
***
The fall semester began. I spent my free evenings with him - visiting him in the computer lab while he worked on flash projects, going with him to shows, watching movies together at his house with his roommate. There was an unspoken understanding that, unless my job or class work prevented it, my evenings were his. And yet nothing had changed, not really. The ambiguity made me anxious.
One night he messaged, apropos of nothing: I am a tumbleweed, and you are a century plant.
***
In early September he writes: I need you because you listen and care. You make me feel sane and human, like things are worthwhile. Plus, you’re teaching me how to cook.
He was rarely so straightforward.
***
There was a Friday night in mid-September, outside of a venue on Main Street - he was leaning against a fence and I had hopped up on the gate, each of my feet secured between wrought iron spindles, while I gripped the top. As the gate gently swung back, the result of shifting my weight, he leaned forward and quickly drew the gate towards himself. Placing a hand on either side of me he said “You can’t get away that easily.”
But nothing else happened. After a moment he stepped back, and we made our way into the club. I began to wonder if I’d been misreading things.
Just friends. If I repeat it often enough, maybe I’ll believe it. It would have been the smart choice. At some point he’d become my best friend, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuck that up. Yet on the other hand, I really, really did.
***
A week later we were sitting in his car. He had pulled over into a parking lot, waiting to hear where we were meeting friends for dinner. He was nervous, uncharacteristically edgy, hands gripped tight on the steering wheel even though the car wasn’t moving.
“I desire a more complex and fulfilling relationship with you.”
It wasn’t a commitment. It was barely an admission of feelings. It was, in fact, so close to nothing that I missed his intent entirely.
The words I had been waiting months for had apparently come and gone without my notice. His demeanor quickly became quiet and sulky (he was an expert sulker). Assuming that I’d blown him off, he’d all but stopped looking at or speaking to me - through the drive, through dinner, through viewing our friend’s new apartment - he was clearly upset and I was still clueless as to why.
By the end of the evening I was past confusion and almost to full-blown angry. I still had no clue what I possibly could have said or done to warrant this reaction. Maybe he is finally tired of me. I had hit my breaking point and snapped, resulting into a two hour conversation, one that began with tears and frustration and ended with us being together.
In hindsight any relationship that began under such circumstances - his consistent inability to say what he really meant, my perpetual obliviousness - was doomed to fail. On some level I had always known this, and yet I ignored it.
The next night he took me to the Mexican place with the great crème brûlée, and we ran into a friend (the one from the Whitney Biennial. I still think of that evening whenever I see her artwork). It was the same, but also entirely different, being with him now.
I was 22, euphoric, and lacked the life experience to see the inevitable issues at hand. Instead I reveled in the fact that we were finally something. Something definable. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. I finally knew what it felt like to be with him, to know what it felt like to be held by him, to be able to reach out and touch him without second guessing myself. To be together.
***
Things were very good until they weren’t, and the inevitable end came swiftly. Maybe this had all been a big mistake, we agreed after multiple tearful conversations.
Just Friends. We’ll always be friends. But the thing we both knew, and didn’t say, was that it would never be the same.
***
We still hung out. We went to shows, so many shows, and on roadtrips and wedding weekends. We talked about most things, with the exception dating. He did eventually end up learning about the drummer in Austin, and I found out through friends that he briefly had a thing with a married woman.
For my birthday he took me back to the Mexican restaurant from our first official date. He apologized, but it was vague, like so much of what he said, and I’m not sure which thing he was apologizing for. Still unable to say what he really meant.
Just friends. Still friends. Right? It became harder and harder to convince myself. I was so desperate to hang onto to something that was already gone.
***
He talked me into coming out to a show last minute on a Friday night. It was November, almost year since we had ended things. We didn’t drive together, but he met up with me in the bar. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before, but I have a friend with me.”
It took me a moment to catch on. “Oh my god, if you’re on a date just say so. You don’t need to make it weird.” Or, you know, any weirder than it already is.
“Noooo, not a date. She just showed up. I’m honestly not sure what I think of her. It’s strange that she invited herself, right?”
And yet I barely saw him the rest of the evening. He didn’t even introduce us.
***
On New Year’s Day a few of us drove out to his new place to help him unpack. I couldn’t get a read on him all evening. Whatever was left of our friendship, our connection, was all but gone. When we left he hugged everyone goodbye, everyone but me. I got a throwaway comment as he walked us to the door, something hurtful and petty, said so quietly that no one else could hear it. I said nothing, determined to take the high road.
We were twenty minutes away when I realized I had left my purse behind. I considered just leaving it. Getting a new drivers license and debit card honestly seemed easier than facing him again. We called ahead and he met us in the parking lot with my bag. It was easily one of the most humiliating moments of my life.
I found out a week later he’d been dating that girl from the show since November. It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t have mattered. No longer dating. No longer something in between. No longer just friends. Apparently nothing at all, and there was no way back.
***
From that point on we would go months without contact. The next fall he wrote me to apologize in advance for not inviting me to his wedding, a wedding in the Japanese Gardens that always reminded me of the birthday we spent there together. I wasn’t sure why he bothered writing me - it was so much more insulting than if he had never contacted me at all. Unless, of course, that was the point, something he seemed very capable of. Had he always been so petty?
I mourned, not the loss of a romantic partner, but the loss of one of my best friends. I wished more than anything that we had never been anything more.
***
The next spring, several months after their wedding, and he contacted me out of the blue. I was thinking my wife and I could meet you for lunch sometime soon. Are you in?
I hated myself, because my truth still remained the same: In, always in when it came to him, no matter how many times he lashed out, because at that point in my life nobody understood me the way he did.
We met in the West Village, at a trendy noodle spot that has long since closed. We sat out on the patio and visited. His wife was lovely and, honestly, I could see how good they were together. She balanced him in ways that I could never. Under different circumstances I could even envision us being friends.
After lunch and people watching we went back to their apartment. I met their dog. My friend was particularly proud to show me all of the floating frames he constructed, filled with artwork from our friends. It was hard not to be sad when I left. I didn’t want to be with him, but I wanted what he had, to be with someone who understood me and loved me.
***
The next February I met my husband. I will still adamantly deny that I believe in love at first sight, yet at the same time I knew within a few hours of meeting my husband that he was it for me. I was happy in a way I’d never been before. In July he moved in with me. In September he proposed, and by January we were wed. I found out I was pregnant on the first day of our honeymoon.
***
My husband’s band was playing a music festival. By that point my daughter was six months old, staying with her Nana so that I could get out of the house for the day. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see my old friend there. Our social circles still had some overlap, plus it was unlikely he would have passed up an opportunity to see David Bazan. I thought back to the music festival we’d gone to years before, sitting on a bale of hay watching Pedro the Lion, thinking I might be falling in love with my best friend. Now he was practically a stranger. We greeted each other - a small wave, a terse nod - before moving on.
And that was that.
***
I’ve spent so much time thinking it all over, as though enough thought power could somehow bend the past; wishing things had gone differently and knowing it would have changed nothing.
I’m not good at letting people go. Never have been.
12:14 p.m. - 2023-07-05