Unceremoniously

Or, This is why we stopped speaking

I.

I think you got tired of always having to initiate things. (I don’t blame you.) I could never get my nerves to calm down enough to do it myself. You’d pick me out of a crowd and let me know you’ve seen me. Two-finger salutes, references to our late night IMs. And I loved you for that, I did.

It was never that I was pretending not to see you—I was pretending not to exist.

II.

I lied and turned down your invitation to go to your band’s show because I knew I didn’t belong.

III.

There was so much left unsaid between us and it felt cheap to me, trying to cram them all into one word mumbled in passing.

Your name—three letters, four—had never been so heavy.

IV.

You kept telling my friends you missed me and not doing anything about it.

V.

And I don’t know if you know this, but I tried. You were never there. It made me feel strange, asking for you at lunch, afraid people would see through me.

“Have you seen him?” They hadn’t.

I doubt anyone ever really knew we had...this. Sometimes I relished it, that we had some secret togetherness. But every time I sought you out and asked where you were it made me feel small and discombobulated.

VI.

You might have been trying to tell me something once. And I got ready for a confrontation, to try the truth out for a change. But then my overthinking got the better of me, and I froze and walked away.

You didn’t follow.

Maybe I did ruin everything.

VII.

Nobody actually saw through me those days, I’m almost certain. But when we ran into each other in the hall, you acted like you did. I just followed suit. Or maybe it was a mutual decision we didn’t even realize we were making.

God, I’ll never know.

VIII.

I used to think I was sad for us, and for a while, this might have been true. I still get sad thinking about it, if I’m being honest. But I don’t think it’s about you or me anymore. I feel for people, how we drift in and out of each other’s lives, how it just happens. How it hurts, and how it stops hurting.

The truth is, it stopped hurting for me long ago, but what I got stuck with is this emptiness I can’t define that’s lost its shape. Sometimes the emptiness looks like you. But the pining never does.