It’s always that first walk back home from the bar when
you’re single that reminds you why you had a boyfriend in the first place. A
little tipsy, you slosh and trip your way down the sidewalk past Port Authority
on 42nd street and realize how mean and cold everyone looks at three
a.m., even when it's eighty degrees outside and you’re trying to keep your bra
straps from sliding off. Your friends all went home hours ago. There’s nobody there to hold your hand or call you to
make sure you got back to your apartment okay.
And maybe when you get home there are a couple of his things
still lying around the apartment; the books he accidentally stockpiled on your
shelf, or the bottle of wine you bought together and forgot to open. Maybe he
was kind enough to do the dishes before he left for California, and maybe you notice
that absence too. Maybe you get a little angry, like, Why did he do that? Is
he trying to make me feel guilty? But then you realize that maybe you’re just
a little sad that the only dishes you’ll be washing from now on are the empty
ones you'll use as buffers between your Lean Cuisine tray and your stomach when
you’re watching Netflix in bed for six straight hours.
I’ve never had
this kind of empty heartbreak before; the kind you read about occasionally, but
never believe actually exists. The kind where you sit next to each other, going
tequila-shot-for-whiskey-shot until you can finally, honestly, say, “I love
you, but this isn’t going to work.” The kind where you try really hard not to
kiss each other or hold hands when you’re walking down a chilly Lower East Side
Street, but you can’t help it, so you do anyways, because you aren’t really
falling out of love. The kind where you get back to your apartment and lay in
bed all night crying and cuddling and knowing that when the sun comes up, its
over.
And maybe he rides the bus with you on your way to work in
the morning, and you call him as he’s arriving at the airport and beg him not
to get on the plane. Like, maybe if you can just pretend that last night’s
conversation never happened, he’ll make the big gesture and get off the plane
like Rachel in the finale of FRIENDS. Why not? It’s New York, after all. This
is the city where these things happen.
It’s a long time before I really start crying. In the
beginning, I’m diplomatic and charming, factual and breezy.
“It’s not that you don’t love me,” I offer him. “It’s just
that you love history more.”
“I know,” he says. “I just always thought that you would be it.”
We talk about his move to Boston for grad school. How it’s
only 3 hours and $35 dollars away by bus or train, but it isn’t the distance.
It’s the fact that he’ll be gone for seven years doing something that he has a
passion for, something that he loves more than anything. More than me. I am
always going to come second. And he knows that.
He never says, “Maybe we could try to make it work.” He
knows we can’t. And I do too. I’ve known from the beginning that I would always
be the mistress in his love affair with memorizing names, dates, fallen
countries, conquered battles, and heroic strangers that have built everything
around our modern age.
He’s been my best friend for eight years. We met outside of
a Barnes & Noble where he was working when I was fourteen. He says he’s
been in love with me ever since. He was a little older, so he’d pick me up in
his car and take me to parties with older kids, parties where he’d bring the
drinks and always wear a tie. Parties that started out in someone’s parents’
living room and graduated to back yards and front porches in the California summer air.
Sometimes, we’d drive out to Los Angeles at night in search of
some adventure. We always found one. He’d take me to these terrible,
hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants that he loved, the kind that had walls
lined with gumball machines and gave you a stomach ache just looking at the menu.
It’s funny to me that he became a cook. For the past year, he’s only made me
the most delicious five-star dishes in our tiny apartment.
When I had my heart broken before my sophomore year of
college, he helped me load up my white Ford Explorer with everything I owned
and drove with me to Texas. We made stops on the way—of course, at those shitty
little Mexican restaurants—to eat and buy fireworks and tequila. We slept in
seedy, Southwestern motels and listened to the Clash and the Specials all the
way through Arizona and New Mexico and El Paso.
“You listen to such sad music,” he’d say, and force me to
turn off whatever Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s song was playing on
repeat.
Every time I came home to California, he was there, waiting,
always holding aside a weekend or an evening to spend with me. Last time I was
there, a year ago, we had one night of overlap on our visits, so we spent it at
a mutual friend’s birthday party. He brought a girl. A pretty, plain, tall,
doll-like girl who dressed as I always imagined a girl he was with would dress
in vintage clothes and Mary Jane shoes. After seven peanut butter and jelly
shots, I grabbed him by his tie while my brother was singing karaoke and kissed
him anyway.
He took me out to breakfast to this little diner in the
Valley, the first place he had brought me to eat that didn’t make my stomach
turn. We snuck in a bottle of white wine and tipped it into our carafe of
orange juice when no one was looking. It was probably the worst hangover of
both of our lives, but he looked so incredibly handsome in his tie and suit
jacket, sitting across the table from me with an omelet in front of him. Our
waitress brought out my French Toast and sang us a little song. For a year,
I’ve wanted to go back to that diner and thank her for singing that song. It
was the moment I evolved into the happiest version of myself that I had ever
been. He kissed me goodbye in his
doorway, and promised to visit me in New York.
The next year of my life passed by in a blur, the kind of
haze that settled over the Jazz Age and made it romantic. He would take the
train into the city and I’d meet him at the bar at the Roosevelt Hotel.
“You’re dressed to the nines,” he would tell me, and I’d
blush. I always dressed up extra for him. We’d slide into the back of a taxi,
the polka dots on my dress clashing with the striped button-ups he always wore,
and make our way into Manhattan.
I spent Thanksgiving at his tiny, A-frame apartment in
Vermont. We stayed in bed while it was snowing and I baked s’mores in the oven.
For Thanksgiving Dinner we drove an hour to a restaurant that his friend worked
at and cooked in their kitchen. I sipped champagne and never wanted to stop
being the family he chose to spend holidays with.
We shopped for apartments in January, and built IKEA
furniture together for the next week. I was wary, but I broke all my rules for
him. We spent every moment that he wasn’t at work ordering take out from Grand
Szechwan and watching all eight seasons of How I Met Your Mother. We got in fights
sometimes. The beautiful kind of little fights where I’d pick on him for not
doing the dishes and he’d get passive aggressive when I’d leave my clothes on
the floor in the bathroom. I thought to myself, this is what it’s like to be in love. It was never anything we
couldn’t solve. I’d look at him, reading a menu online or slicing cucumbers
twenty minutes later and realize that I could never really be mad at him.
He got accepted to grad school, and I was elated. His father
came into town to celebrate and we drank too much Saki and laughed and stumbled
home at midnight. I knew for sure now that I only had a few months left of being someone's first choice. And then,
suddenly, I wouldn’t be anymore. I was no longer the greatest adventure of his life.
I loved Matt in the way that made me never
want him to see me in sweatpants because pretending to be Daisy Buchanan and
Jay Gatsby was far too much fun. But he loved me just as much in pajamas as he
loved me in vintage dresses, and that’s more than I could ever ask for of
anyone. I loved folding his button-ups and meeting his friends. I loved staying
in when he cooked me dinner as much as I loved sitting across from him at our favorite
restaurant. I loved warming up his freezing hands when we got back inside from
carrying shopping bags from Whole Foods all the way from Columbus Circle in the
dead of winter. I loved worrying when he would cut his fingers at work in the
kitchen, and I loved when he would come home unscathed. I loved telling him
stories about David Letterman, and listening to him describe the proper way to
smoke meat for Delaney Barbecue. I loved being proud of him for presenting his
paper before the Spanish and Portuguese Historical Society in New Mexico, and I
loved when he complimented me on my hard work in late night television. I loved singing Sir Psycho Sexy with him at Sing Sing Karaoke in St. Marks. I loved that I never had to ask him twice to dress up with me; regardless of the theme, he would transform himself into James Bond or a Charles Dickens hobo or a Bill Murray character, even if it wasn't even close to Halloween. I loved
that he always kissed me goodnight, even when I was mad at him, that he never
let me go to bed without knowing I was adored. I loved his optimism, his curiosity,
and the way he always had to be right. I loved his jaw line and his Bob Dylan
hair first thing in the morning. I loved kissing him even before we had both
brushed our teeth.
I don’t know what to do. Taylor Swift and Mick Jagger and Dear & the Headlights never write songs about this. How do you fall out of love with your best friend when
neither of you did anything to warrant a break up? We were happy. We still are.
He never lied, and I never
cheated. We didn’t yell or scream or threaten to throw each other’s belongings
out of the window of my high-rise apartment. We didn't listen to Elliott Smith on a loop and try to find a way out of our sadness. We didn't say the words, I hate you, or this wasn't meant to be.
Instead, we held on to each other and cried and tried to fall asleep, and for the
first time in a year he didn’t kiss me goodnight.
