“God, I’m so damaged,” He mumbled.
“Aren’t we all?” I laughed.
“Maybe..” He said with such hopelessness, like he was saying it simply to convince himself.
“Listen, I think that’s just a part of growing up,” I offered.
“The older we get, the more time we have to collect baggage. I’d like to think that the whole point of it is to find someone who can fold your issues up and hand them back to you in a way that doesn’t make them feel immense anymore. Like finally, you’re not as damaged as you thought you were.”
He mulled my words over in his head before shaking his thoughts loose.
“But I treat them like it’s a game and that can’t be helping them not be anymore damaged than I am… like I have this sick need to drag them down to my level of fucked up.“
He looked at me like I was supposed to tell him he was wrong. That he wasn’t the hurricane I knew he had become in the years since we had lost touch. But I couldn’t. I had caught my own brief glimpse of his rainstorm in the times that he would reach out to me, in the dark, after months of silence; like I had become the only sunny day he could remember in his life. He just needed to step back into the warmth for a moment, if only to remember that it had once existed.
“I blame it on you, you know? Before you, I never had any feelings. I was never hurt before you. Now that’s all I’ve been since.” He said.
I paused, unsure of what to do with the warped compliment I wasn’t sure he was giving me. I lost myself in memories of our old life together; moments of tenderness that were split right down the middle by a hateful version of him I never remembered being introduced to until he was hurling ugly words at me through a phone line. The phone would disconnect followed by our life together only moments later. I was positive I held my tongue for as long as I could, giving myself a few more seconds to soften the words that were about to fall from the mouth of a girl who was harder than the one he had loved once.
“You left me,” I reminded him, ” and eventually you have to understand that you made that decision alone. You packed up your feelings, one box at a time, and took them with you.”
When he didn’t respond, I continued,
“I don’t mind being your voice of reason or your calm before the storm when you need it, but I’m not yours; you’re not going to find me in someone else if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“You were right to ignore me for as long as you did. You should have kept ignoring me,” he said, an immediate hardening evident in his voice.
This is what our melted friendship had become. It was a series of touch and go moments strung together sloppily and barely hanging on. It was conversations in the middle of the night, when life became too heavy to sift through alone. It was misplaced anger meant for someone else who had gotten too close; sentences punctuated with ‘leave me alone’. It was my phone lighting up in the middle of the night with messages of insecurity or questions left open-ended because we were too scared of the answers. It was vulnerability and honesty we couldn’t hand over to anyone else because they wouldn’t understand it quite the same; it wouldn’t feel the same in their hands. It was a blazing heat that burned so bright and fizzled out faster than you expected it to. Our relationship was and would continue to be holding on and letting go until one of us decided we were tired of burning the other to the ground; or more likely: until we were nothing but ashes.
Alyssa Chaffee 