I’m going to be brutally frank with you.

No, we cannot be friends.

There, I finally said it. We can’t be friends because that would be a huge insult to myself, considering I tried my very best to get you out of my system. And I’d also be doing myself a huge injustice if I settle for just friendship with you when we were so much more before shit happened.

We were so much more. It was everything all at once — from consuming passion to quiet contentment, drunken, crawling-on-the-floor, pass-out kind of Friday nights to lazy, half-awake, glowing kind of Sunday mornings, fancy, candlelit dinners in restaurants to cheap, greasy pizza fests on the floor, big gatherings with friends to dancing together alone in your bedroom, short messages to long phone calls in the wee hours of the night, from quick hugs to your head on my lap, fast asleep like a vulnerable, innocent little boy, tired from a day in the school and playground.

I have these snippets of beautiful memories and so much more, and you want us to be just friends? You’re a fucking hypocrite. From your seemingly kind smile to the glass of wine you slid across the table to me over a ‘casual’ dinner between ‘friends’, every inch of you just screams hypocrisy. And everything you try to do to win this ‘friendship’ you want from me simply reeks of pretense at the highest level of the insincerity spectrum.

We had something worthwhile that ended in complete wreckage, and it took me months to recover from it all. I spent several sleepless, torturous nights when, in the deafening silence and unnerving solitude, I felt like my soul was being ripped from my flesh because I was in so much emotional trauma and pain. My mind was caught in a web of disturbing playbacks spanning from the day we met to the moment we lost it; your voice, once music to my ears as it weaved beautiful words together for me, turned into a haunting sound that I kept hearing late at night, though now it sends chills down my spine rather than leave warm, comforting caresses on my skin.

You absolutely have no idea of the struggle I went — no, crawled — through for me to finally reach this state of actually being okay with seeing you around and not wanting to gouge your eyes out or just scream a string of obscenities to your face.

I healed through time. I recovered and was able to regain my balance. It happened gradually, and I’m still amazed that I was able to help myself get through it. You really have no idea what you’re truly made of until you reach the height of pain and black-out chaos in your life; you will rediscover and even learn to love yourself in the process of recovery. Then you’ll become the best possible version of yourself after the madness.

And this best possible version of me right now is not willing to be friends with you.

I did not go through all that just to strike a ‘friendship’ with you after the ordeal. I’m okay with seeing you around, talking to you sometimes, but let’s not push it. Staying friends in the aftermath of the mess with the person who once crippled me is an insult to all the efforts I did for myself in order to recover.

If I follow my still feeble heart and give in once again to you, under the guise of a so-called friendship, then it means that, for the second time around, I’m not loving and giving myself enough respect to completely cut your toxicity out of my life.

And if ‘friendship’ is your way of still keeping me around because of — let’s be real here — the benefits you can gain from it, or maybe because you’re just scared to completely lose me but you’re also not brave enough to take it to the next level so you say let’s be friends like it’s the most normal thing on earth after our breakup, then I’d have to be brutally frank with you —

Fuck off. No, we cannot be friends.