Friends
ideally
I hold fast to the idea that the truth is the most important thing. And I hate using the word thing but I don’t have a good replacement yet. I had a weird and vulnerable phone call today on Canal street. Right between Guchee and Shanelle. I told my friend I felt there was something in the air between us, which sounds like something a Macbeth witch would say. Which is fair, because I’ve been drinking potions lately (chai latte, oat milk.)
Twice in my life, I’ve told a close male friend that I had conflicting romantic feelings for them, because I’ve conflated romantic and platonic love. And both times, I ended up in the friend zone. People speak ill of the friend zone but to me it sounds like a cool club for teens on a cruise ship where you can sneak away to eat chicken fingers while looking over the sunset in Ft. Lauderdale. The first confession ended up in a take-backsies situation where we eventually dated- but then that ended poorly (see- Pillowtown 2021.)
I didn’t want to write again about being rejected by a man because I don’t want that to be my legacy. My legacy has to be that I won first place in my company’s 2024 Mac and Cheese contest. And I would stop writing about male rejection if men would stop rejecting me. Fellas??
This isn’t about rejection, or men. This is about ideas. If it’s true that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, then we live in a constant state of performance. Of storytelling, of shadow puppetry, of movies and poems that don’t make sense. Of dreaming and painting pictures in our heads to fall asleep at night. To pass the time on a long commute. To give ourselves the motivation to apply mascara on a Tuesday because, what if. I told myself a story about a boy and girl who were friends for years until they weren’t. About a boy who only ever saw her as a friend but then she took her glasses off and- would you even believe, she was beautiful the whole time.
Ideas can be misleading. “I have an idea” can be the first words out of the mouth of the dumbest member of your group project. It can be the start of your friend explaining a card game to you when you’ve had 1.5 glasses of orange wine and you’re about to fucking lose it. Ideas can be bad. Ideas can obscure reality. Ideas can be ideal, but not true.
Ideally, I’d be in love with my friend. What’s a boyfriend if not a best friend you kiss? A best friend for holidays and late nights and hard conversations and snow storms? A best friend who carries your shit? Ideally, everyone would love each other in the same way. Friends love friends as friends. Lovers love lovers as lovers. Google docs hated that sentence. I’m not loving it either but I’m moving on.
Whenever people say “you don’t like _, you just like the idea of _” it’s like they don’t even know or care that I studied philosophy. Ideas are my whole thing. And I did like the idea of dating my friend. Because as an idea, it’s a good one. As a reality, it is bad in nearly every way.
Friends to lovers is rare. Lovers to friends is made up. Friends to friends is a dinner party and lovers to lovers is PDA on the subway. It’s 2am and it’s snowing- god’s dandruff. Every year on the first snowfall I have to remind myself that when Harry met Sally is a fictional movie written by a woman, about something that could never happen- eating a turkey sandwich at Katz deli in broad daylight.