Jake,

It’s been over a year since you first picked me up from my apartment in that silver convertible, the one I would tell all my friends about, and paid for dinner at the end of the night (two dishes, shared). I brought my laptop and a notebook, determined to make it as non-datelike as possible. After all, it could easily have been two people, two academic peers, working together on a class project (a partnership initiated by you via phone the week before, after getting my number from my email signature and “accidentally” texting me “by mistake” because you’d stored it for class and not “stalker purposes”). We could have just been grabbing dinner, getting to know each other, discussing theory and the random group of six that made up the waaay more than slightly pretentious seminar where we’d met and where we spent four hours once a week.

But we weren’t, and I knew it.

I didn’t buy the “Oops! Wrong person!” text routine from the week before but pretended to with commitment since I could hardly believe that (someone like) you could be interested in (someone like) me. But you were, and you made it clear. So clear, in fact, that even I eventually started believing it. I guess I can see the attraction: I was (am), as you’d constantly remind me, smart, which seemed like it was at the top of your list, and even though you told me once, as we were lying together in my bed after having sex, that you were glad I was so sexual (surprised because you’d thought I was a virgin when we first met), I think you liked that I seemed virginal, blushing and self-conscious and hardly able to meet your eyes. Maybe it was different than you were used to. Or maybe it was just your type.

I noticed you, would be aware of you, from the day we met. I’m still not sure if I loved you all along, or only after it ended, when I could listen to those sad songs and delight in the agony of it all. And when I miss you now, think of you, I’m not sure if it’s really you I’m missing, or just a you, the you in every sad song. I don’t know if it matters, and it certainly doesn’t change the way I feel, but I think it is you, and not just the idea of you, the presence of you, an imagined you.

That first dinner, the one I came to armed with a notebook, laptop, and attempted indifference, was my first date. And if that doesn’t count as a date (see: notebook/laptop), then the dinner and movie (sushi and Of Gods and Men) we went to a few days later certainly does. Because what I told you at that bar on the water (the first bar I ever went to, the one where I, still plagued with the remnants of my eating disorders, ordered a gin and soda based on careful internet research from earlier that day on low-calorie drink options, and, dizzy from the alcohol (which I never drink) and from being oh so close to you, leaned my body into yours, feeling your arm come up around my shoulder), that wasn’t true. Those (two?) relationships I talked about having, with details so uncoordinated I’m surprised you didn’t see through them, those never happened.

Before you, I’d kissed two people. The second had been just a few weeks before us at a frat party, as I, sweaty and tipsy and dancing on a stripper pole platform, sloppily swapped saliva with a handsy frat guy whose face I never really saw.

The first, four years before, was my junior year prom date. I was 17 and terrified of/thrilled at the possibility of romance, of boys, of love, of attention. I laid in a sea of pillows, surrounded by my sleeping friends and next to my sleeping date, whose heart had been pounding so fast after we finally broke away and I pressed my palm to his chest in the darkness. I stared out the window until the sky changed from black to blue, wide-eyed and full and alive, not yet knowing how I would handle things in the days, weeks, months, years to come, not yet knowing the regret I would feel over how badly I would mess it all up after that night, that heartbeat, that sky.

And in the four years since that boy who was the first kiss, first regret, first missed and mismanaged opportunity, I would still think about him, sometimes nostalgically, sometimes mournfully, sometimes indifferently. I think you’ve taken that place, or maybe just joined him there, the place where I still miss, still wonder, and yes, sometimes still wish. But with him, the something we could have been become nothing under the weight of my own fear, and I learned my lesson well. With you and me, I don’t regret my hand in its ending; I said what I needed to say, knowing that the silence which crippled me at the age of 17 was not what I wanted at 21, not what I wanted ever.

And now here I am, over a year after you first picked me up in that car and over a year after you first bought us two dishes to share. We rarely speak, and when we do, it makes me want either to never do it again, or never stop doing it. I am beyond ready to leave behind this ache, to call you my friend and to mean it.

I want to fall in love, to meet someone who makes it so clear why it could never have worked with you, why it could never have worked with anyone but him. I want wide-awake nights, secret smiles, butterflies in my stomach, and the feeling of belonging to someone like I felt for the first time when I was with you.

But until then, it will keep being you, always/only/unrelentingly you, the one in the song, the placeholder on the other side of love.

Your future friend,

C