The Talk

A while back, I wrote a post about hate. I told an anecdote about my friend who I had begun to hate. I have never hated anyone as much as I hated him. We stopped being friends in early January, and since then, I cannot describe the pain that I felt. He was a person that had meant so much to me, and to remove him from my life like that, it killed me. Taking a person away won’t change the feelings you have for them. But he had told me he didn’t want to, or couldn’t rather, be my friend, and I am not the person to beg for friendship. 

We work together, that is how I met him in the first place, and I would see him every time, and each time I saw him, it hurt. I would hear him talking to someone and desperately would want to be the person who he talked to. He would walk past me and I would plead with God for him to turn around and tell me that he really did want to be my friend. It was hell working there. I was stuck in some middle ground. I hopelessly wanted to be his friend. I knew he didn’t want to be mine, yet I thought there was some chance we could resolve this. 

After four months of being stuck in this limbo, I decided that I had to talk to him. I wanted him to look me in the eyes, and tell me that he wanted to give up the love for me he once had, wanted to discard our friendship as if it were a dirty rag, wanted to truly abandoned me despite knowing how much I needed him. Most of all though, I wanted him to make this decision knowing everything he would be doing, because ultimately, he was in charge of our friendship. I wanted him to tell me that keeping a secret about himself that he didn’t want anyone to know was worth giving me up. I wanted him to know that he was trading in secrecy for love. 

It was so hard for me to ask him to talk in person. I’m horrible at confrontation, at least when any other emotion bedsides anger is involved. But he agreed that it was something we should do. It took us three weeks to find a time, and finally, he told me to come over. Now I had pictured this conversation, and in this image, I never went to his apartment. That would be far too hard for me. But that was the only way this was going to get done, so I did it. When I got there, he wanted me to talk first. He wanted me to share my feelings. Now, this was too much for me. I think I have maybe shared three genuine feelings in all of my life, and now I was asked to share these feelings, the ones that had inflicted so much pain on me. I did though, because he was worth it.

After many tears and a few hours of talking, we figured it out, at least as much as we could. He decided he wanted to be my friend. I’m not sure what will happen, but were not always meant to have that information. All we can really do is let life hit you, and react to it in the best ways we can. That’s my hypothesis. 

Peace.