Coda

Forgive me for breaking the silence. I know we don’t operate like this, but the fifteenth is approaching, and I don’t want to waste your time.

I’ll just say it: I moved back a month ago. It was Elijah’s idea. I was vehemently against it—I want to make that clear. It was a sensitive subject as his sister is here, and she is sick, and my only real rebuttal was that you are here, too. Though, in the end, I hid behind my disdain for returning to our hometown in our thirties. As you can see, I lost.

I write all that to say, I saw Genevieve at the grocery store the other day. It was the first time I had seen her in about ten years. I never told you this, but I have you blocked on social media. (I know it sounds harsh but trust me, it’s more for my own sanity than it reflects my feelings towards either of you.) So, I hadn’t known she’d cut her hair, and I hadn’t known she was pregnant again. Two years ago, on our day, I remember you said you may try again, immediately followed by a sigh and your pointer finger flirting with the circumference of my resting hand. The truth comes out now: I loved that you didn’t want it. It was helium to my bloodstream—I could’ve floated away.

When confronted with the sight of her round stomach, I first felt a prickling betrayal, followed by a rush of shame. It came to me then that we may be sick people.

The boys were there with her—Josiah’s hand on her pant leg as a distraction while Coleman snuck a cereal box into the buggy right as they were checking out. I have to ask—did you teach him that? It only worked when we did it to your mother because she couldn’t care enough to engage with the hassle of putting it back. Genevieve just said, “Again?” and set it on top of the gum display at checkout. I did laugh to myself thinking of how defeated we would’ve been if your mother had been so callous when we were that age. Maybe we’d be more disciplined now if we didn’t always get our way.

I had a dream the night after I saw your family, though it felt more like déjà vu. It was a reimagining of your eighteenth birthday. All the same, but the sky was canopied in unnatural purple light. The house was yours but looked more like where we went to kindergarten. Those small chairs, the window that only the gym teacher could open. The display with the colored cards to say who was good and bad.

In the dream, I hadn’t brought Nita with me because she didn’t work a shift with me that day, and because I never brought Nita, she never called Genevieve to pick her up, which means Genevieve never came into the house, you never spilled your drink on her, and you never cleaned it off her alone in the downstairs bathroom. All the other major events remained. Your brother still broke the good chair with Chanelle on his lap. Anya and Caleb still made the dip that gave everyone food poisoning. We still ran through the entirety of Lover’s Rock as people began to file out, but instead of being in the bathroom when “All About Our Love” played, you were by my side. We were the only two left. We sang to each other while placing ceramic plates in the trash—while throwing glass cups at the wall—watching the shards fall down for our entertainment, catching the light like sharp prismatic rain. When the song ended your hand found my lower back and you didn’t move it. The sun was just outside the window, knocking on the glass, waiting to swallow us whole. You had a look I’d never seen you wear in all my life. It was scared, but somehow sanguine. Skin melted off your face in a slow, waxy drip. Then, you turned to me and said with a tremor, “What are we doing?”

When I woke, Elijah said I was shaking. I told him it was a recurring nightmare from my childhood.

I do not dream of you often. I hadn’t in a long time; I don’t think my body could handle it. When I did it was only in flashes—never so vivid. Never reaching into my chest with such determination, ringing my bones like a bell. I feel I’ve awoken from a deep sleep.

There was something about seeing your kids kick around that grocery store. Coleman’s eyes were as big as you said they were—just as brown and glossy as yours. Hungry for mischief. Already attuned to what is owed to him, what he can bend to his will. Seeing you once a year has always allowed me this distance. I often forgot how real and delicate your life was. When I left the store, I dry heaved into the open air of my Camry.

I’m writing to let you know we’ve reached the end of the line. I don’t feel it’s up for discussion. I find our friendship has become indecent. And while it has never been physical, I’m sure you can agree with me that this is not entirely innocent. There has always been deception in the ambiguity of our relationship. I think we need to be honest with each other.

Do you remember that first year out of college when we saw each other at Anya and Caleb’s wedding? You and Genevieve were on a break, still unmarried. Elijah and I hadn’t reconnected yet. That was the longest you and I had gone without seeing each other since ninth grade when you moved to Ohio for a year, then moved back. I didn’t know if you would come to the wedding because you’d stopped speaking to me. When I’d call your place Genevieve would say you were out, but on the days you picked up you sounded miles away. A voice in a vacuum—asking questions as though to fulfill a duty. Nothing about you felt corporeal. 

When you walked through the church doors at the wedding—and this is absolutely true—I watched my life flash out before me in a sepia glow. There had never been a longing that took the reins of my life with such bite. I don’t know how else to put it. I would’ve lit myself on fire for you.

You have to understand that in those days I was always trying to understand the unsaid. I decoded your every word, every move, in case you were like me—mute when faced with the opportunity for confession. The hug you gave me after our eyes met felt prophetic. As though it was a long time coming and your weary clock had run out of steam. You said my name in my ear with the determination of a child’s first word. I was so certain of you. There had always been an idea about us, and it lingered with weight every time we were together. Is this the time? Will we be honest now?

It’s been nearly eight years since that night in your hotel room when you proposed we see each other once a year if nothing else—make the arrangements for the next time a year in advance. I see now that the “nothing else” was no more than false assurance. Life was about to begin.

When you said it, your head was in my lap and your top lip was shiny with champagne. You did not mention the silence, so I let it be. There were other things to attend to. Your mother was moving away. You missed your innocence. You missed the shed we’d made ours by the lake as children, with blankets and Gameboys and board games that became water-soaked and flimsy. You missed independence. You missed selfishness. You missed New Year's with my family in our old neighborhood. When you asked how my sister was—asked if she had better taste in women now—I told you to come around and find out. That’s when you got quiet.

I thought you’d fallen asleep—your breathing was so still—but then you said: “If Genevieve never comes back, I think I’ll be alright.” I prayed for her disappearance and wished myself a witch. Then you uttered the most naïve sentence I’d ever heard: “Had I ever considered the possibility of us?”

Your hair was my favorite then—kinky on the top, tapered on the sides. No ear piercings yet, skin inkless. I told you I had considered us, that everyone had. You must have known that with the way people were so cautious around you and me when they liked one of us. People in school treated us like an inevitability. 

You told me Genevie had always considered us too and confessed that was partially why we’d gone so long without seeing each other. “I’ll never compromise on you again,” you said.

Genevieve did come back, of course. I understand that some compromises must be made—it is the nature of love—but it took me a long time to forgive that I wasn’t invited to your wedding. I have held onto this animosity for so many years and I finally feel removed enough from the pain to be honest about it. Hindsight has allowed me to accept that my feelings towards the matter were based on principle. If I had been invited—though I would have gone—I would not have wanted to be there. I may have walked out. I may have objected. (I played through that scenario many times, but even in my daydreams I couldn’t see it going my way.)

I want you to know I get why you implemented the rule of the year-long silence—I know Genevieve has no tolerance for our friendship. The thing is, I think it only made things more intense. The meetings became a sort of beacon for me. Before Elijah, nothing in my life could compare to what I felt on those days. I lived in a yearlong hibernation—only in your presence was I able to breathe.

The third meeting after your wedding—the year we met in New York—that’s when I knew this was jeopardous. You didn’t mention Gen or the baby once—do you realize that? For the first hour, I tried to determine whether this move was calculated or genuine, and then I gave it up. It didn’t matter. I reveled in their absence. My love for you always had a narcissistic heart.

The whole night was a nostalgia fest—that’s what our entire love has been. Pictures from our families on vacation together. A photo you drew of me in the shed during a thunderstorm that is always in your wallet. You pressed your hand to mine, collapsed the space between our fingertips, and asked me if I’d ever grow. Must you always take care of me? You said this friendship keeps you alive with a warm hand to my cheek, a stroking thumb, and I knew we were both kidding ourselves. I knew we were putting our whole lives at the mercy of our present desires. And still, I slept next to you in that bed. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t touch, that we were stiff and separated by the open space of the king mattress. I knew I would keep choosing this life if never presented with a way out.

In the morning as I packed my things, you grabbed my wrist. “Please don’t go,” you said. “I don’t want to return to life just yet.”

I have always been so desperate for you, so shamelessly desperate for you, that in that moment I felt what you must always feel. The live heart of another, pulsating in my hand.

When we played house, you would get upset when I stuffed pillows in my stomach and said I was with child. (Back when we thought pregnancy was a result of the magic kiss at the altar.) You always insisted you didn’t want kids, even the year before you had one. Then, that was your life. And still, you wanted to remain with me, untouched, in a hotel that was not home to either of us.

I ruminated on this concept for a long time. The thought that you loved me more than your own offspring. That, perhaps, I knew your true desires more than your own wife. I felt it romantic and profound. I’d roll it around in my head like clay—molding visions of a life I’d never know. Only now does the thought strike me as sad.

I think life will be easier for us both if we accept that a conventional friendship is not possible.

When you asked me a year ago if I really loved Elijah, if this life was what I wanted, I was being honest when I said yes. I know we used to make fun of him in high school. He was so demure—so reserved. I had no idea he had also moved to Denver. When he messaged me asking about the book I’d just posted, and then asking for dinner, my natural inclination was to say no.

How wrong we both were. How wrong I’ve always been.

All those lofty desires that had gathered dust in my mind—he fulfills them. The other morning, I was bedridden from period pains and he brought breakfast to me on an oak platter. On my birthday, the living room was a shrine of balloons and roses. He talks me down from every ledge. He brings grace to every disagreement—a calm to all chaos.

A few nights ago, we realized we both kept journals in college and decided to read through them together. What trust. I mean really, how deeply vulnerable. Towards the middle of the night, he read an entry where he mentioned an ex-girlfriend of his. I don’t remember it verbatim, but she had an M name and it said something like: We haven’t been together in five years and still she is the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about at night. I think I’ll always default back to her.

We laughed and I joked about how he could leave me if he wanted. We weren’t married after all. He said, “I felt more for you in the first week than I felt for her in all those years.”

It was a lifetime ago. It was resolved. Yet, in the shower the next morning, my heart was uprooted. Isn’t it harrowing how one’s love can move from room to room; with each move, the pure-hearted belief that this is the last one? He had felt that certainty before. And to stay in that one room for five long years, even while distanced from the lover—it terrified me. I sat down, let the water whip me, and I wept—only getting up when I smelled the breakfast he was cooking in the kitchen. It was clearer to me than it ever was. He has every fragment of my love.  

I’ve found that the promise of you was always more enticing than the reality. Limbo provided such security. It was a good ruse on our part, meeting all these years in secret under the pretense of being best friends. Getting on an airplane to maintain a ‘platonic’ connection your wife so ardently detested it had broken up your relationship once before. Nothing good has ever required this level of discretion.

I had grand visions of you all my life—now hazy and foreign, played out in cinemascope. I saw us walking down the street. I saw us hiking a tall mountain. I saw us as sea creatures lounging in a big shell. I saw my fingers in your mouth and you were sucking like a baby. I saw a baby in your arms with brown, prodding eyes. A candle in your hand. My back hot and wax soaked. Your teeth in my jaw, hungry. I saw dinner on the back patio. Our mothers sat by the Christmas tree. A full kitchen sink. A portrait. A foyer wall.

When we met last year, I spent the entire day wishing I was home. It’s all gray now.

Why didn’t we just do it? What stopped us?

Maybe the intrigue was in the restraint—the fact that it would never be realized. I do believe there is an inherent romance within two people who have known each other all their lives, subtext lingering between them. I also believe that if we’d seen it through, we may have found that neither of us is what the other needs. This allegiance we have to each other—I think it will destroy the joy in our lives. 

In the hotel room—the night of Anya and Caleb’s wedding—you said in your best Jack Twist impression, “I can’t quit you.” I laughed and told you I would never try.

I don’t know everything. You imagine the life ahead of you—try to be one person and come out the other side weathered. Things get muddled in the fray and time is at a full sprint. Door closed after door closed and there we were, tight-fisted, trying to jam one open. I like to be welcomed into a room. Can’t you see it now? There’s nothing left for us here. The party is over. Everyone’s gone and we’re the only ones that remain. We’re toying with the fever of the sun. Save your life before it’s swallowed up. I’m going to save mine.