"I'm scared that I'm going to end up alone. I'm scared that I'm always going to be somebody's friend, or brother, or confidant, never quite somebody's everything. Mostly I'm scared I'm never going to find a guy that I love as much as I love you."
Okay, this is a quote from Dawson's Creek, so first off, fuck you for judging me. Secondly, just shut up and keep reading.
I don't deal all that well with male friendships. I know this is a huge gay stereotype, but as much as I hate having to identify with anything gay (self-loathing homo much?), it's the truth. They make me anxious. Despite having a few close male friends, they're sort of outliers, as though women are my own species and I have a few extraterrestrial buddies on top of that. Whenever I'm with a guy friend, I am keenly aware that I am indeed with a guy friend.
This brings us to the opening quotation. I have a male friend that I am not in love with. This is not remarkable, or shouldn't be at least. I do, however, love him very dearly and in the absence of someone to be in love with, this can muddle the brain at times. This is usually pretty innocuous, little jealousies here and there, an odd dream from time to time. I have these with most of my friends actually, but for some reason when they happen with him...I dunno, they just cut deeper.
I am not attracted to straight men. Not. Ever. This single fact is likely the reason why we were able to become friends and remain that way. Sometimes I think that despite all the various facets of our relationship, if this one fact were suddenly called into question then the entire friendship would be at risk, like the most architecturally sound house being build atop a single brick that you didn't know was holding up the whole thing and one day it crumbles and the entire structure comes crashing down. We can only be friends because I don't believe this brick exists. Still, the house exists and it is on the closest friendship-property I own next to adding the word 'in' before love. If you understand the metaphor I'm going for here then bravo, 'cause frankly it's 1:30 in the morning and I'm struggling to get it.
It terrifies me that I could spend the rest of my life (because this friend is a lifer) putting heavy, inappropriate, misguided internal pressure on this person because, for no other than being wonderful, he has been cast as my occasional closest-thing-to. I've stated before that I believe a person - or, more specifically, I - can be happy being alone during their life and I still believe this is true. However, as someone who is capable of romantic love and has experienced in short yet epic bursts, I think certain elements need to manifest in other, only slightly torturous ways, such as not being in love with your friend but on occasion thinking as if you were. All of it boils down to this: I am capable of loving another person so much, as witness to how deeply I care for this friend, that as great as it is, if this was still only the closest I could ever get and I never found someone I loved more than him, I would look back on my life not with regret but with such sadness.
A couple enders:
1. I've been incredibly scared lately of my social disinterest in love. I've been thinking that I grew out of it, along with the other passions that ruled my early adulthood, from falling deeply into the hearts of virtual strangers to practically destroying my house in decorating for a party. But my heart has been beating so fast as I've been writing this post, and I turned off the lights and told myself to go to bed twice before deciding to just get up and pour this out. So maybe I haven't outgrown my irrational passions. They're heartbreaking but I want them around forever.
2, I've been spending a lot of time recently talking with a friend about their problems and I suspect because of this mentor-mentee relationship that they might have started having certain feelings of one-sidedness about the sharing of their traumas, that because of the advice I've offered that I am above emotional upheaval. If you are reading this, I hope this proves that I am just as weak and scared, and that we're just two people talking.
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