Perfect Illusion

The last time alcohol scorched my throat so harshly, I was alone in in the frostbite air contemplating how to move forward with my life after my grandmother passed away.

Now I numbly sit in my busted up bedframe with the room dimed to a personalized grey lighting, anger just boiling through my body so aggressively that the inside of my eye was pulsating like a blown out speaker.

How dare he make me feel this way? I was never a sad drinker.

I looked at my bottle of Captain Morgan and realized that this was the same drink we took turns downing when the two of us last hung out together alone. If that bottle itself hadn't been so expensive, I'd have tossed that poison across the room and allow the multiple shards of glass to penetrate any exposed skin I had available. Any other sensation must feel better than what I was experiencing.

This person was my friend.

A person who I called brother and who I allowed to call me sister.

In the end, he had played me all along. Just another fucker who was trying to get into my pants. I was a tool to make him feel good about himself.

I spent three years of my life defending him against my jealous husband and relying on this guy and our friendship as an anchor to sanity. But it was all wasted and burned into oblivion.

My earnest efforts were exploding into a cruel joke from the universe.

If only that was all that was wrong with me.

What twists the knife into my insides and keeps me up at night for hours on end, is the hateful fact that I do genuinely miss him and the friendship that I so heavily depended on.

To me that's the worst part of this whole endeavor.

I should be able to move on with my life and be relieved to never have to defend him or feel like it was some kind of scandal to hang out with him. Another problem out of my life right?

I wish it were that easy. Instead, whenever I find myself alone where no one can hear or see me, all I have to do is remember his smile and I can't stop the ache in my throat or the little droplets of tears trying to escape out of my eyes because i truly do miss our friendship.

It felt like he was there for me when everyone was staring down on me with a microscope.

When I came back to live home again and I felt like a loser, it was his face that I saw first before anyone. He made sure to arrive at the airport early so he wouldn't miss me. I'll always be grateful for that because I was expecting judgement and a little resentment from the ones who were picking me up.

But not him. He was just happy to see me and gave me a hug.

I almost cried because that was the greeting I needed. Maybe not what I deserved. But nevertheless, it felt so good.

He even made the effort to take the crappy public bus system to get to the airport because he didn't own a car.

After a few weeks of settling in and figuring out where I was going, we started hanging out on a regular basis. He insisted on walking everywhere and introduced me to Boba tea and Korean Barbeque. We geeked out over secret guilty pleasures and bonded over developed interests. When we were together it always felt like a party because I had the best time. In my mind, we didn't need anyone else to have fun.

I even miss when he annoyed me. This man purposefully said and did things that made me want to throat punch him but we were always laughing and I like that when we were together, there was no stress about impressing each other.

But if I really think about our friendship, I think what really sold me was the idea that he was the only person in my life who knew what it was like to know what I was going through. Of course that was furthest from the truth but that's what he made me feel. It made me alienate people in my life that were just looking out for me.

He made me believe we were two lost souls just going through the motions with no direction and that the world didn't understand what we were about. For hours, we would sit outside a local bar and just rant about our mistakes, problems, and irritations that made us spiral into a very dark hole.

No matter what, he was someone who I could count on without the built in fear of being judged.

Now he's not; and never will be again.

I can go on and talk about what he did that day that solidified the end of our friendship but it just reminds me how toxic we really were for one another. I can't say I was a tremendous role model of a friend for him either. We were just enabling our worst behaviors because there were no boundaries.

In the end though, that's what creates horrible versions of human beings.

Also, what different would it make if I did? It doesn't make me regret my decision to end things nor will it change the fact that I choose to never see or talk to him again.

But now, I'm realizing in order to move on that I need to accept the fact that I will always miss him. The more I deny, the more I'll resort back to the toxicity that I began with and then I'll ruin all the good I worked for.

My life is far better than it was. I'll never regret my choices from that point on. But I think a part of me will always be angry about the fact that I will miss the friendship I had with him

Whether it was fake all along or not.