Closure Eyes

Maybe I should have met more people.

I don’t mean that I should have dated more people.  I was terribly awkward at that, and the only real relationships I ever had were with guys I was friends with first. I probably should have dated less, honestly.  It always seemed more like an exercise in validation rather than searching for someone I could spend my life with, or even stand for more than a month.

No, I mean that I should have actually met more people, like, in general.  Made more friends.  Allowed more people behind the wall, so to speak.  If I had, perhaps I wouldn’t be in the predicament I’m in now. If I had allowed more people into my life then the void he left wouldn’t be so large, even after all of this time.  It wouldn’t be so confusing, to mourn a friendship this much, without having any romantic feelings attached.  At least I don’t think I do.  But that’s a hard thing to dissect, isn’t it?

It doesn’t make sense, not even to me, but the heart isn’t always rational. All that I know is that I miss someone terribly, someone with whom I never even shared so much as a kiss, and that the feeling is still here after all of these years.  He was the only person I’ve ever met who was truly on my wavelength. I am not so foolish as to believe we could have maintained a friendship.  We both moved on, and that level of emotional intimacy wouldn’t have been healthy for either of our marriages.  It was easy to pretend we were still friends after he got married, but once I met my husband I realized what a dangerous game that was.  Plus it had been years since we were close.  Just puppets, going through the motions, keeping up the appearance of a friendship when it had died years earlier, not all at once, but in tiny little increments, so slowly that we didn’t realize it was happening until it was already over.

I remember the last time I saw him, at a small music festival we were both attending in support of my husband’s band. By that point my firstborn was six months old.  He didn’t really know my husband, but when he had left the friend group my husband eventually took his place, even playing in a band with the same people.  It was like he was lifted out and my husband stepped right into the hole he left.  I can only imagine how bitter that made him.  We barely even said hi, and at lunch we sat at opposite ends of the long table.

I remember the last time I heard from him. I sent him a short note when I heard he and his wife were having their first child. His response was chilly, polite, impersonal.  I am sure that he was still resentful I hadn’t told him I when I got engaged or when my daughter was born. But he didn’t invite me to his wedding.  Tit for tat I guess.

What I don’t remember is the last time that we hung out as friends, rather than semi-strangers going through the motions of friendship. Maybe it was the time he took me out to dinner for my 22nd birthday, to the spot where we went on our first and only date.  We had shared our birthdays ever since our freshman year of college (I am four days older). He had the audacity to apologize during dinner, without really specifying what he was apologizing for, as if a blanket statement of regret could possibly cover everything. That was in May.

It was New Year’s Day when we went to see his new place. He was warm and friendly to everyone but me.  When we left he hugged everyone but avoided me, and as I got into the car he simply muttered “have a nice life”.  We were 20 minutes away when I realized I had left my purse in his apartment.  I honestly calculated the cost and effort necessary to replace my drivers license, car keys, and debit card before asking if we could turn around and go retrieve it. So angry, so humiliated.

By my 23rd birthday we hadn’t spoken in five months.

We didn’t run into each other at shows, we no longer ran in the same circles.  He lived twenty minutes away but it might as well have been the other side of the world.

There was one more time, after he was married.  It was more like show and tell than a real visit. Weird, disjointed, performative.  “Here is my wife.  Here is my dog. Here is the art we hung up on our walls.” And I nodded dumbly, chatting about the guy I was dating at the time, pointing out an elderly man with a fancy cane while we ate on the patio of an upscale noodle shop.  I think I cried the whole way home.  The indignity of losing something so valuable to see it replaced with the exact sort of phony small talk we both despised (as any decent person should) was just too much.

I am not so foolish as to think I would have married him.  We were terrible as a couple.  We didn’t even make it a full month. But I never envisioned a future where we weren’t friends. He had to make it weird, to act like the jilted ex, to play the victim when there was no cause for it. He was really good at that, playing the victim.

And I love my husband more than I can articulate.  He is pleasant, disarming – the friendliest person I’ve ever met.  There isn’t a brooding bone in is body, thank goodness. I am more at ease with him than any other person on this planet. But there are parts of me he doesn’t relate to.  That’s probably a good thing.  I need a buoy, not an anchor.

I don’t  even know why I’m writing this.  I don’t know why it still bothers me, almost twenty years later.  I just wish I had met more people. Maybe a female friend I could have opened up to in the same way.  So that all of the inside jokes, the finishing each other’s sentences, the knowing exactly what the other person was thinking from across the room wouldn’t have gone to waste. So that someone else could get my pretentious jokes and simultaneously call me on my pretension. So that I had someone who understands exactly why I need listen to the same song twenty times in one day because I feel it so damn much. So that almost every memory for a decade or all of my favorite songs didn’t remind me of our doomed friendship.

So that I wouldn’t feel so guilty for still missing him.