I Cannot Be Friends With You Because I Once Loved You

By

You’re the one who loved me the hardest and yet gave me the least. We were torrid and dramatic and somehow also beautiful. But you weren’t mine to have, and so I never fully got you or your time or your heart.

And that snowy January morning at 5AM when I walked away from you before the sun came up, when I didn’t even glance behind me as you shouted my name down the hotel hallway, when you ran after me, barefoot in the snow…my heart was broken and I knew I was over you.

After time, we began speaking again, in small spurts and bursts. You would get drunk and send me texts at 2AM, and I would laugh when I saw them upon waking. We had quick 10-minute phone calls, so different from the marathon all-night calls we used to have. We didn’t speak about feelings or our situations or relationships. We were…friends. Just friends. Until my heart began to flutter when you’d call. Until you were hurt when I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was with my boyfriend. Until we both became jealous and emotionally entangled and everything felt the same as it used to.

You were angry when I stopped answering your calls altogether. You taunted me in your texts, never resorting to being mean, but teetering on the edge of insulting me when you realized you’d been really and truly and fully replaced. I moved on, I was in love with someone else, and I no longer felt responsible for the love you couldn’t feel for your longtime girlfriend.

But we could not be friends—not after all that.

I can’t answer your calls without giving you parts of me. Parts of me that don’t belong to you anymore. I can’t stare at you across a high-top table and casually catch up over beers without thinking about every single time we’ve kissed. I can’t hear your voice and not have it resonate in my soul–we were soulmates once, though not anymore, and I refuse to tempt fate by having you in my life.

I’ve laughed so heartily with you, you have seen more of my tears than any man I’ve met, and a part of me will always love you. I know I’ll never truly be over you, so I cannot be friends with you.

Maybe in the next life, when we are both cats.