the air is sticky and humid while i wait outside for his car to pull up. i hold my hand up to shield my face from the sun, watching his little red honda fit (the cranberry, of course) veer around the corner. my stomach is in knots but i’m forcing it down. i had to send that text, right? someone had to say it.

he exits the car, sun catching his strawberry hair. his eyes aren't fully able to meet mine, but i don't mind. i don't think i would be able to do it, either. besides, he's just here to drop off my decarber.

"hey," i say.
"hey."
"thanks for coming by today, i know your work schedule is pretty busy."
the words feel like plastic in my mouth, generic and cheap.
"no problem."
he sticks his hand out, and i pocket the small green device, its aluminum body cool in my hand.
"thanks again. see you."
"wait," he mumbles, as i turn to re-enter my apartment. i turn back.

his eyes are welling up, and my face gets hot. before my brain can catch up he’s stepping forward and his arms are outreached, pulling me into a hug. my arms are pinned and i realize my fist is still closed around the pax, just digging this stupid piece of weed machinery into his back.

"i'm really sorry," he chokes through tears.
"me too," i say.
and i mean it. i squeeze my eyes shut and hug him back with the cold metal in my hand and i really do think, thank god, we are fixing this. we were about to repair things to where they had been just a year ago, when we were having near-daily hangouts and sleepovers. thank fucking god.

we hung out after that, it was just weird. the happy reunion of souls i so desperately wanted, that i thought was inevitable... it just never came. there was a time where we watched "battle royale", a movie entirely subtitled, and he just sat on his phone the whole time. i remember asking how he could possibly be reading the captions, and without looking up once from his twitter feed, he assured me that he was following. i sat there feeling like i was hanging out in a stranger's house, which was insane because we were people who once ate a bunch of mushrooms and watched Peep Show and then had to turn it off because it felt like we were actually the Show being Peeped. people who could have conversation about anything for hours straight without getting tired of each other. people who stood by each other through some of our darkest moments up until then. i had spent nearly every birthday from 16 to 22 with him. now, we were just two strangers sitting in a quiet room, watching a movie on the tv and remaining completely out of reach from each other. it was unfathomable.

it's crazy to look back and realize the rot really didn't start with anything in particular. the parade of temporary replacements was the most glaring symptom of our disease, maybe one of the only ones. their flavor of the week right before i finally snapped and sent the text of doom was a budding "best friendship" with a girl who had repeated my jokes louder the few times we hung out, who proudly got all of her clothes from temu, and claimed that the children's show "bluey" was her favorite. a literal children's cartoon.

meanwhile, he and i were (had been?) the kind of people who watched the entirety of succession together as it aired, who mocked line-toeing centrists and routinely discussed geopolitics. yes, i know how pretentious it sounds, and it was! we listened to trueanon and blowback and opined about political theory. we were cynical and sharp, serious people, at the end of the day. we were plenty silly, but we remained intellectuals, nonetheless! i couldnt understand how he was compatible with these juvenile usurpers, and why they were repeatedly choosing said usurpers over me. how do you trade a seven-year foundational friendship for conversations about the newest bluey episode where they learn about zoo animals?

i thought to myself that maybe, i was just outgrowing them.
i brushed it away as something that could never really happen.

it’s a very specific kind of cowardice that happens in your early twenties, i think. when your path diverges so heavily from someone you've been so close with for so long, nobody actually knows how to look at a person they’ve loved for seven years and say, 'i think we have reached the end'. it’s too quiet. it’s too sad. so instead, we manufacture a war of good vs evil. it HAS to be someone's fault, right?

the massive, loaded text i had sent didn't actually do anything to "fix our friendship". my overwrought "concerns" and insecurities, spilled across the floor... none of that REALLY mattered, those were just the weapons i picked up. i threw a match into a room that was full of gas, because it is so much easier to be the righteous, boundary-setting victim of a bad friend, than to admit you might just be two people who don't fit together anymore. it's very easy to think that history makes us bulletproof, especially in relationships as old as mine was. everyone knows someone who has their "best friend forever," but i think the much more common experience is just carrying around a broken heart over the best friend you had since you were fifteen.

and of course, when i dropped that bomb on him, he didn't surrender either. he just picked up his own weapons. he got mad about my concerns, swore i wasn't being replaced, used my relationship as a shield, saying that he 'figured we wanted alone time as a couple'.

it was such a flimsy, obvious excuse! we were in a victim-off, weaponizing "boundaries and understanding" in order to deflect from the problem we both saw. i was using my concerns about his personal life to avoid admitting how completely discarded i felt, and he was using my relationship to avoid admitting that he just didn't want to hang out with me anymore. a pair of friends once inseparable, standing on opposite sides of a massive chasm, pointing fingers.

it’s funny, because i recently finished re-watching "girls" (as in Yesterday), and that's the whole reason i even wrote any of this. the first time i watched the show, i remember watching hannah detonate every relationship in her life via unforced narcissism and selfishness and thinking that i was soooo much more self-aware than her. but looking back, i was running the exact same script! we really do believe that because our lives are complicated, and our feelings are big, we are entitled to be the messy-but-ultimately-lovable protagonist of our own indie dramedy within Raleigh, North Carolina or whatever. and when you're that deep up your own ass, you stop seeing your friends as real people with their own burning worlds, they're like NPCs whose only job is to push your character arc forward, or to act as a sounding board for your own brilliant neuroses. and it's like... you're 21. let's be serious!

but that brings us to the final text. the grand finale that wasn't. after my boyfriend and i actually broke up a few months later, it was all i could do to send him a message about it, even though he was also pretty good friends with my now-ex. a few days after some stilted conversation about the whole thing, i sent my old friend one last message, something along the lines of 'hey, i really appreciate your friendship over the years and im sorry for putting you in this position between the two of us. hopefully you don't hate me'.

with retrospect, it was a plainly ridiculous and selfish message. like obviously so.
"hopefully you don't hate me"?
jesus christ. what was i thinking? i was bleeding everywhere.
i was asking for a season finale. i wanted the cinematic hbo climax, where we scream at each other in the street in the pouring rain, air all our grievances, and then tearfully hug it out. i thought our history entitled me to a monologue. where was my hannah horvath moment? i waited for a few days, checking my phone, waiting for them to play their part and give me my closure. but that wasn't really their job anymore, and they knew that.

instead of a response, i just noticed one day that i had been quietly removed from their private twitter (after i made a series of tweets that they probably felt targeted by, and i probably should've been more conscious about my timing in posting them...) and then came the rather unceremonious softblocks across every other platform. they blocked a bitch on letterboxd, man.

...and that was it! maybe surprisingly, i didn't push it. i just... finally accepted that the friendship was dead, and there was absolutely nothing i could say or do to change it. they had built up a notion in their head of who i was, based on things i had said and done, and even if i felt it was inaccurate, this notion was a person they wanted absolutely nothing to do with. that made it real! and maybe for the first time ever, i did nothing to stop this from happening. it was over and done. the best thing to do was let the credits roll on a relationship that had run its course. i'll never get the cinematic closure i really wanted, but that was kind of the absolute rock bottom i needed at that point in my life and it all turned out alright anyways.

i still think about running into them somewhere, someday, and catching up. but i know that won't ever happen. and honestly i think i'm okay with it!!