How it Goes

tw: drug use, profanity

I want to be friends, now.

Or possibly strangers, I am nicer to people I don’t know…and there is a part of me that still wants to be nice to you.

I wanted to be more, once. But as we’ll all come to see, more was too much.

What we already had was enough for the time - sex, drugs, and rock and roll - minus the sex. So, it was more like drugs, music, and depression. We were children then, both being raised by single parents with nothing but time on our hands. I had the pocket money and fridge full of food; you had the connections and the friends, the personality and goals. We both had chips on our shoulders but had decent souls, and we made each other laugh. The foundation was agile enough to hold us when we wanted to fall – which was often. We were used to the scattered ideas, the disappoints and stolen childhoods, the therapy sessions, the hospital stays, the lack of understanding, the relentless energy of youth. But as the years passed, what we stood on became incredibly small - vapid and unsteady.

How do these things occur? Naturally, of course. Our timing became out of step, and our positions continued to shift throughout the years.

At one time, the only thing I could offer was my car. Once again, I was perpetually broke and between jobs, searching for a daily high and an escape from reality. While you were constantly working and in long-term relationships. I was dead dropping from the high boards and consistently reaching out for a partner in crime. It had become a pattern for me then, to mix every drug present in an attempt to shut everything off. You were attempting to build something better. While I was trying to burn everything down. Until it was I who was trying to heal and you who were digging the knives in.

This was the cycle that repeated itself, and our timing remained off. Only one of us was healthy and thriving at a time – while the other was drowning – and we crossed paths out of obligation or the initial warnings of that paradigm shift. It would be one night or a binge that would set us off in different directions toward sobriety or into a bottomless pit. Until it wasn’t us anymore, two individuals were struggling, and pain sought out pain - as humans are prone to do.

We eventually grew up, in one way or another. It is hard to know someone you have never indeed known. It is harder to look into a mirror and realize how much of yourself is a lie – and to rebuild.

But this is where it left us.

It was a gorgeous fall evening. The sounds of traffic had quieted down, and the sunset grew hazy in the clouds of smoke. You were smoking cigarettes again because you quit weed. I had stopped smoking cigarettes years ago - when I couldn’t afford the habit anymore and no longer went out enough to bum them. But became very medicinal with my weed intake and usually used these times to be the stoner flattened on the couch – instead of needing it to function. I took part either way, as we smoked and drank the rest of the twenty-four pack with plans to walk down to the store for another. Other friends were supposed to be stopping by later with liquor.

It was the first time we were hanging alone, after the time before, wherein fifteen years of friendship, you admitted in the crudest of manners that you always wondered what it’d be like to “fuck me” and insisted, “we just bang it out.” It was another one of those mutual rock bottom moments. You were struggling and unhappy, but I was trying to do better and had finally accepted what it was we were.

I now think it was the defining end of our friendship.

I just didn’t process it then. I kept wanting to hold onto something with you or see if we could be or do “normal” things together. If we could drink for fun instead of sadness. If we could still be us having a sober day, but each time recently, I just fell short of feeling and would eventually want to escape from you or drink myself into oblivion like you’ve done every time we’ve hung out since.

It wasn’t the first time I was made uncomfortable and talked my way out of a situation.

You had apologized when I picked you up, and all I could do was make a joke out of it. By making light of it not being the first time, someone’s exposed themselves to me. It actually brought up those dusty and dark childhood traumas of being disappointed by someone you once trusted. Sex was a known limit. And you had tried to goad and dare me into fucking you. We were not even drunk.

It was coming to that natural course, though. We bring out something toxic within each other. And as reality strikes at those desperate little hopes that movie-perfect scenarios come true. It was not that. It was as lackluster and fizzling as can be. You genuinely wanted to talk about it, because in truth, it was you putting out every feeler possible about how to see if we’d work. Your relationship was ending for more reasons than us. But the idea was always planted there from the start. When you harmlessly call them by my name but then purposely use me as a scapegoat when you disrespected your relationship in multiple ways. However, we could always agree on one thing: that we would be a murder-suicide couple waiting to happen; the only toss-up was who was killing whom.

I always teetered with hopes of romance, shifting in my wants. But I never could intentionally interfere; that was the pill I was meant to swallow. I wanted you to be happy with whomever you were with. Your choice had never been me, and your thoughts were aimed towards the dynamic of our friendship. I had to be okay with that. Through my own relationships, I started to – but that’s also when you’d become jealous and intentionally begin to interfere with mine. Further distorting already blurred lines that managed to never be crossed until then.

I couldn’t trust you. I didn’t see you the same way. I didn’t understand what it was you wanted. You didn’t understand me either. You tried to have a sober day, and I told you, let's get wasted. You attempted to insert me into your life in other meaningful ways, and I kept my distance. I shied away and thought otherwise. I was stubborn in thinking we needed more. You were unwavering in thinking we needed nothing else.

Now, we agree. We want what is best for the other. We have our regrets. We’ve made our mistakes and took our advantages and abused what it was we built. We want to be friends now. But we are strangers instead, wishing each other well from separate shores, in quiet thoughts and everlasting memories of what we once were but are no longer.

Just humans.

Who knows? Maybe we will be in sync again. It is a natural way.