Stay Friends

He stood in the stairwell with a bag of his last things. An awkward kiss that landed somewhere between my mouth and my cheek. And then, quietly: Let’s stay friends. The words hung there longer than his footsteps down the stairs, louder than the door slamming, crueler than the plate I threw at it later.

Fresh from the wound, the phrase feels like an insult. Stay friends? What does that even mean? We lived through each other’s bodies. I have names picked out for kids that will never exist. You knew every inch of me, and I told you things I’ve never told anyone. You were the center of everything, and now you want to get coffee and pretend that the past few years were just time we spent together, like roommates?

But the thing is, the phrase makes a kind of sense too. It assumes friendship is some middle ground between love and nothing. That you weren’t worth the maximum, so we’ll settle for something. That’s the logic of it, the cruelty and the honesty packed into four words.

We have these enormous expectations now that we’ve been freed from needing marriage for survival or respectability. Love became the thing we’re supposed to want, not the thing we accept. And because we can choose, we want everything: the passion and the comfort, perfect sex and total understanding, the freedom and the exclusivity, the everyday routine and the constant adventure. Forever. Every single time.

It’s an impossible standard, and we know it, and we want it anyway.

The phrase is also honest in its own way. What do you say to someone you’ve loved and hurt and don’t want to lose completely? Cutting them off feels cruel too. At least staying friends means you’re not erasing what happened. That it mattered. That they mattered.

I don’t know if we stayed friends, really. We tried for a while. But there’s something absurd about it anyway—pretending the past tense of love is friendship when what you actually feel is a kind of permanent tender ache when you run into them at the store.