Love is Friendship on Fire...

If love is supposed to be a friendship set on fire, then why is it so much harder to have a frienship after being in love? Is it because we're all soggy and covered in the water we used to put out our fire, and secretly we just want to go home and dry off instead of standing there getting water droplets on the floor?

It's kind of awkward. I know I've only been in love once, at least I assume it was love because it was the only time I felt the way I did, and there I was sitting on the sofa looking at him drinking coffee with the muscles in my face becoming numb from the forced smile I have pasted on my lips. We don't have anything to say, and I feel like everytime I make a jump to speak it has something to do with our relationship in some way, and he can't look at me, and I want to scream. WHAT HAPPENED!? Yet, in some sick way, my heart is racing a million miles an hour at the fact that he even showed up and is attempting to put in the effort to be my friend.

Friends are good. I keep assuring myself his being there is great, because now I can gain closure and he can be in this little tiny spot in my life even just for a two hour coffee meeting with friends. That's better than the six months of ignoring each other unless it was to bicker or beg. I texted him, thinking he wouldn't respond because he never does, and yet he says he'll join me for coffee. I spend the next twenty minutes having turret like symptoms as I crane my head around to look out the weindow in five second intervals.

I'm waiting to see him, because I know that I will recognise him a mile away. At least, I think I will. He couldnt have changed that much, right? My friends around me are laughing in that forced awkward kind of way because they worry for my sanity as I bounce up and down and try to determine the right way to place my hands so I look casual. Ah, the intricate nature of a dead relationship! I see him, like I knew I would, wearing his flannel and ripped jeans. He walks in a bouncy, almost feminine way and I can't help but to let out a huge sigh and look wide-eyed at the girl next to me.

He's texting, which I know to either be a defense mechanism or destraction. Maybe he was regretting this, maybe he was afraid, I can't really say. I look away the closer he comes, and pretend to occupy myself with my own phone. He walks in and does this grimace type face, walks straight to the counter and orders. I wonder what he was thinking.

When he comes to sit, he forces himself between two people, one being a stranger and the other our old mutual friend, instead of taking the huge empty space next to me. Like I have the plague or something, but that's fine because I can look at him and hear him and that's better than I've had in the last six months so I honestly don't care where he chose to sit. I'm reminding myself to be cool, because it's not that I intended to trick him into coming as some ex-girlfriend drama or anything but god he's beautiful. I distract myself by saying one quick 'hi' to him and then turning away to carry on a very thin and polite conversation with my other friends.

He doesn't say a word, like he's just waiting for this mistake to end so he can go back to his life. But eventually he warms up, he starts to make jokes and make fun and have conversations. But not with me. He can't even look at me. At some point everyone except him and I are gone and I smile at him and he kind of forces a smile and looks at a spot above my shoulder. Why he can't look at me, I don't know. We all have our defenses. But I talk, in an almost too happy way, about the things he might care about or might not.

I tell him about my sister, she loved him so much that I think it was a bad idea to bring her up because he looked like I had stuck a fork in his arm. I never thought about it from his point of view, but he has to be hurting too. Maybe he functions better, but there was a huge part for me to play in his life just as much as there was for him in mine. We broke each other, to a degree, but I wasn't thinking. When he's around, I felt alive. And not alive because I was fueled by sadness but happy, and anxious, feeling this adrenaline rush because he was there in front of me.

He couldn't once look at me, our eyes only met once or twice by accident and we both looked away. For me it was painful, I know the color of his eyes too well to want to look into them. For him I think it was just awkward. He leaned over and whispered to my friend and showed him a picture of his new girlfriend, thinking I didn't hear so I pretended not to, and it actually didn't hurt. I was glad for him, happy he was happy. That was always the intention for me. I guess seeing him, thinking about being friends at some point, made whatever very visible changes I saw in him seem okay.

People change, as I keep saying, and we both have changed. But when a song came over the radio that was playing in the cafe and I got excited and said "This is my song!" and he smiled sincerely and half whispered "I know!" and hummed along while I sang the words, I realized that what happened is always going to be engraved in our memories. The bits and pieces of each other (like my song or his eye color) will stay with us until god-only knows when, and that makes it real. That makes me feel less crazy. It helped me so much, helped me feel human. And even though I don't believe we will ever be together the way we were in my Once-Upon-A-Time, I am content to say we are working on a reconciliation and friendship.

A friendship that I hope will one day dry itself off from the water used to put out the flames, and blossom into something that is good for both of us.