I--
I remember you in my purple room that night long ago, lights soft and hazy and low, a slow indie song playing in the background. I was leaving for New York. We were friends.
But our friendship was littered with words we never spoke aloud, with stoppered chemistry we never let spark, with pauses and silences, and faintest brushes of skin on skin. We excelled in barely touching. We would lie on the same bed, and I always knew the exact space of you, the precise inch of you that might conceivably overlap with an inch of mine. But we never breached the confines of our spaces.
I never knew why or how we decided we would only ever be friends this way.
In short time, our mutual friends faded away, and our friendship was held up by these moments: late nights, long drives, stolen from who knows whom, carved out of routines I knew nothing of. You lied for me, I know that. You would always show up for me, and yet you covered your tracks so no one knew where you were. You drove hours to get to me. We liked watching the stars and the moon out on the roof. Your girlfriend or fiancee called sometimes, usually when we had lost track of the hours, and you never mentioned my name, or where you were. I always want to ask you why, but we never talked about things like that.
Originally published on Tumblr, May 2023.