I Love You, To the Marrow

Complications of dating your best friend.

Currently Listening to: You by The 1975

When I think of you, it’s a headlight glare. A soft, sporadic burst of light that then fades like a child finally finding sleep. 

I’m 16 and lying in your bed, dazed by youth - choking on the various outlines of who I want to be. We spend our afternoon watching shit TV, and, at some point, you get up, rifle through your vinyl collection: Radical Face, The XX, Kodaline. Ben Howard. The Middle East.

It never ceased to amaze me how denouement we felt. That, as teenagers, life had already met its ruination. Nothing mattered after you. Nothing still does.

Music was the language you spoke. Back then, and even now, your underbelly rarely sees the light of day. I’d find you in pieces, collect you like stamps I’d later stow in the hat box beneath my bed. When you realized my first car had no bluetooth, you burned me CDs. Almost eleven years later, and I still close my eyes to the starting chords of “You” by The 1975, just to remember that stygian, night sky, the canyon overhead. You’d screamed at me to park the car so we could run out to our friend’s trampoline.

♪And you’re a liar, at least all your friends are…♪

We were just two outcasts, gilded by the luck of finding one another. Our little town, plagued by murderous family men and pedophilic artists became the backdrop to our adolescence. The wind was strong enough to tip cars. The sun was hot enough to split the Earth. I think that immortal dread was our hot spot, a shared birthmark, to this day, we don’t talk about.

I tell people we’re soulmates with a seriousness comparable to a doctor delivering a fatal diagnosis, because this felicity that anoints us doesn’t just gleam and glisten. When you know someone the way I know you, volition is lost. You have hurt me in ways no one else could. Simultaneously, I’ve hurt you. Fallen short. Presented you false promises, overstepped the line you’d drawn in the sand. 

Losing you was incomparable to any pain I’d ever gone through. Three months of damnation. A social performative breakup followed by a haze I couldn’t unravel. In the prelude before Eli, I used to fantasize that we’d meet up and explain ourselves, that there were more than just songs to tell your side of the story. (You’re going to hate that I wrote that) I’d misunderstood your solitude. You’d misunderstood mine. Maybe, that’s what hurt the most, the disconnect. The fumbling of hands. The relationship, that was just an awkward handshake — an attempt to blend in with those that surrounded us, because they didn’t understand. No one ever does.

You and I both know the tale of obedience, nothing ever comes when you call it. We’re constantly confused by the push and pull seen in friendships. The shake and tremors held by those around us in the fight to keep collars. What a strange thing, to see two people and not one.

So many songs remind me of you. One chord, and I’m back at that dusty house shop, serving coffee and drinks named after albums older than us. Penny tables. Copper ceilings, the flaccid penis painted on the wall. It’s not so much that you are all around me, but within me.

Meeting you was a return, karmic relief for the loss of my home and string of heartbreaks. I told you that on my wedding day. Your existence is my proof of fate and a higher power. The same hands that nursed a pulse into the Earth, broke our spine in two. No one can tell me otherwise. Blinded by doubt, all they’d simply have to do is step into a room with us — feel the stratosphere shift.

The paradox of you despises the notion of something like this, but relishes the recognition. A cold mother and conservative town made makes it difficult. You hate that I know you like this, bone deep. Sometimes, I hate it too. It makes it impossible to be upset with you. You know this. We just don’t talk about it, not aloud, at least. We work based on the silent agreement that seriousness will never accompany us again, and beyond the few life events scattered within the decade we share, I haven’t seen it since 16.

I’m saying this with an impetuous hope that you’ll never see this post. Authenticity sells, so why not tell a room full of strangers about us? About you. It’ll soon be a book.

I want to wonder where it’s went, that softness between us. But, I think we’ve just never recovered from our time growing up alongside one another. All nerve endings and new beginnings. Sometimes, a wound spends enough time constantly being ripped open, that the scar tissue becomes ugly.

If I could turn back time, I’d tell us that we were both just confused and too young to understand what the love between us meant. That, the circumstances soon to follow would feel all too raw, that they’d give way to specters and shadows that’d cling to us for years to come. Ones, we’d exorcise through facetime calls every Wednesday and spontaneous flights. Eyes, always, set on the future and never the past.

Perhaps, it’s just me. We both know that intensity is my biggest attribute, especially when it comes to people — when it comes to you. I think I just get confused on the topic of regret. It’s harder to read you from a distance. Yet, at times, it feels fatalistic. I don’t know if I could stand the constant nakedness between us. Do you? How often do you hide from me? I hide once about every few months.

It’s your birthday today. You’re 25. I asked what you were going to do and you said, “watching the Lorax with the lesbians in a park and then debauchery with the gays after”. The reality that you’ve lived away from me longer than we’ve lived close to one another feels like some sort of political lie, an infographic full of skewed information. For 3 months, you didn’t talk to me, but for 3 years you were lightning in my blood.

I feel incorrigible in this space. It seems like every time I dig at the scar, I lose years. I lose time. It echoes inside me, and I fall down into the abyss like an elevator shaft, counting the floors of our life. The drunken stupors. My insomnia. Your face. The first time you were angry with me. When you left me in the rain, and kissed me in the back of someone’s car because I was upset with you. Klick and Klack and Prom. I land on my back to witness the scene of you sitting beside me in media class for the first time.

Did I smile at you?

Do you remember?