All That Recovery, and Then This

Good friends are the most important thing—the ones who absorb the worst of what happens to you, back your dumbest ideas, and stay consistent when everything else isn’t. Male friendships have their own grammar: drinking partners, teammates, the guy you’d help bury something without asking too many questions. Fine. The myth, though, is the cross-gender friendship—the one that’s supposed to work as long as one of you is gay. Which, for the record, is the only reliably functional version.

When it’s not, it ends. Not always immediately, but eventually. One person is always more fragile than the other, and what starts as easy physical familiarity—the accidental touches, the sleepovers, the casual "I love you" exchanged so lightly it barely registers—gradually charges up. When someone finally says the thing out loud, it’s over. The person who got confessed to retreats into embarrassed noises, there’s crying, there’s talking, and the atmosphere that was once completely comfortable becomes a minefield of wrong moves and false hope.

Mine was called Ana. Soulmates in the way you can be at twenty-something—hot summer nights together fucking to Muse and Mando Diao, that loose pleasant mixture of friendship and something else that seemed like it could go on indefinitely. Until I fell for her. And then my insides destroyed everything, as insides reliably do.

The months of recovery are a particular kind of hell: always oscillating between freedom and dependency, running the same circuit up and down. Maybe I can still turn this around. But I want things back the way they were. But she’s the one who missed out. But those freckles.

And when you’ve finally clawed your way out—scarred as the Nile is long, but out—built the wobbly structure of rationalism and self-respect that lets you swear before any tribunal that you’re done, you’re over it, you’ve already moved on—and then her new boyfriend walks into the room. And you want to commit mass murder.