62. “Just Friends”
If you’ve ever wanted your heart to smush like a balloon with the air let out, I’d recommend falling in love with a friend. If that kind of masochism isn’t enough for you, it might also be helpful to simultaneously friendzone one another. Hold each other, press your lips against one another, but remain just friends. Reach new heights of intimacy, but struggle to define anything. Acknowledge that you’re one another’s soulmates, but still mention in passing just how cute the new kid in your class is.
As long as you don’t give your relationship a name, it does not exist. In a society where we place the highest value on language, we cannot see the things we do not have a word for; like the Greeks who did not have a name for the color blue, we have no title for the relationship that lies between friend and lover. The problem with such a fixation on labels is that the lack thereof indicates a lack of commitment: just like we all assume that a relationship between a boyfriend and girlfriend is more volatile than that between husband and wife, the relationship between people who are unable to define their relationship is the most volatile.
For as long as you choose to walk the precarious line between being nothing and being something, you are asking to fall into the chasm that threatens open beneath your feet and swallow you whole. And when you do fall, there is no net to catch you. When the relationship ends, almost inevitably because there is nothing keeping you together—not the law, a lease, or even just public knowledge of your existence, you are left grasping at nothing. If you chose not to mention the more-than platonic nature of your friendship to your other friends, there is no one to lean on when your relationship becomes suddenly less-than amicable. If you chose to keep the secrecy of your indulgence buried in depths of your chest, there are no statuses to update or photos to delete, to burn. When a relationship that was never really a relationship ends, there is no roadmap for moving on.
To the people who knew you as what you were at the core, just friends, there is no problem. Why don’t you just tell them how you feel? Tell them you miss them; you want them back. Would you tell your ex how much you missed them? Drop to your knees and beg for them after they dumped you? No, because you still have some dignity left. For everyone who suspected there was something more from the start, there is nothing to say because there is nothing to be salvaged. Because we were lovers, we can no longer be friends; because we were never truly friends or lovers, we can no longer be either.
I wish I could have you back as any of the above.
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