Seventeen months ago he posted a photograph on Facebook of himself kissing a woman on the cheek. It was one of four or five photos of a group of friends having a sunrise picnic. It could have been a fond impulse, one moment in the red light of the desert, 1200 miles away.
But I knew. With a certainty as hard as marble, I knew this weird frelationship — a giddy, open-hearted friendship that began long ago punctuated with occasional sex — was too much for me to carry.
I blocked him on Facebook and waited to see if he noticed. I counted that day as my first day of abstinence, although I knew he'd eventually be in touch by phone or text.
That it took three weeks didn't surprise me. You see, I knew. I'd put the weight of him down, that drag of pretence of being friends and hiding being in love under my bed. While I grieved, my back felt a lot better, the way Kris Kringle must feel on December 26th.
He texted a photo having to do with curry leaves. We shared a passion for cooking Indian food. I didn't take my time deleting it and went back to my work of grieving the man who felt like he could be my third arm, or I his. Too soon he texted again to ask if I was alright. It was so unlike me not to leap on his crumbs.
I deleted that too.
I've been dumped by men by silence too many times to feel proud of my resolve, however, so I finally emailed him that I couldn't do it any more itwasn'thisfaultbutIcouldn'thelpit. His response was defensive and I had to write again that I felt no blame and wished him well. He finally got it.
Jump to earlier this month. I'm at work, digging around in the bowels of Twitter looking for some information, when I came across a call for a music writer, something he'd be brilliant at. I pasted the notice into an email I titled "We're Not Friends but I Thought You Should See This."
Yeah, I have his email. I didn't quite let go.
He responded the next day, thanking me and asking how I was. "Mezza-mezza," I wrote and attached a picture of my nine-month-old puppy. That gave us fodder for a few days, his new dog versus mine and who was snugglier. One evening I noted that Lismore had been yacking up her breakfast and had diarrhea. He replied with a sad face emoticon the next morning.
What do you say to an emoticon?
Delete.
Throughout those few days, I thought of him rather a lot. I didn't reminisce about our time in Brooklyn or my visits to my parents in Arizona. I didn't think about butter chicken or the adventures we should have had. Instead, I quizzed myself constantly. Could we be friends? Had I done something unutterably stupid? Had I opened my cold heart to the heat of joy he seemed to embody?
It came down to how I would feel if I didn't hear from him again.
It was a change of topic for me. I live alone, work at home, have few friends. My mind tends to drift to triviality when I'm not working. But I found I wasn't haunting my email or taking my phone to bed with me. I knew he wouldn't come up with a new conversation. I was in charge here. He wants to be friends and I can't risk it. I thought about our arguments over music and things he would confess to not liking about me. I thought about why, if we were such good friends, he was such a non-starter at friendship. Then I found that I wasn't thinking about him at all, except as a writing topic.
I want to tell people in frelationships that you can get out and get over it. And if you're the one who leaves, you leave with power. It grows as you count the days and months since you took your exit. And if you happen to cross paths and keep things simple, you get to decide how it goes.
I don't want to be friends with him after all. It's not because it could get seductive but because I remembered too much of the dumb stuff that might have been the reason we weren't more than friends. And I get to rest easy in my conclusions. In the end, I kind of think he's more regretful than I.
But of course he's still in my email contacts.