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In my junior year I became fast friends with a guy named Joe. We talked about our lives and ideas and so many other things - he told me I could tell him anything. I told him about how deeply I mourned my grandmother’s death. We hung out at school, I beat him at chess, we texted late at night. I was so glad we were friends. I even offered to start carpooling, to drive him home when I found out he waited at school for two hours for someone to pick him up, and his house was barely out of my way.
Then...I don’t really know what happened. Everyone was convinced he had a major crush on me. We were a pretty small school, so gossip got around fast. Everyone kept asking me what I was gonna do when he asked me to prom. I assured them all that Joe and I were just friends and that I didn’t like him that way and I didn’t want to date him. A week later, he just kind of...stopped. He stopped talking to me. He stopped answering my texts. He didn’t sit near me in classes anymore. I still drove him home. He didn’t even say hello. He just sat in my car and stared at his phone.
At the end of the year, I found out he was dating one of my friends. I didn’t care, but I wished that he would tell me straight why we weren’t friends anymore.
I told my uncle that summer how I’d lost a friend that I cared so much for and he’d never even told me to my face. My uncle wasn’t sympathetic at all. He told me I didn’t know what it was like to be rejected, how badly it hurt. He said that Joe was justified.
I did know how it felt to be rejected. Joe rejected me, my friendship. I never saw him again.
Then came my first semester of university. I quickly met a boy named Nathan. Nathan was nice and good at the piano and thought I was smart and we got on pretty well. But I figured out pretty quickly that he liked me as more than a friend. So one night I asked him if he wanted to ask me out, if he liked me. He looked a bit awkward, but he said yes.
And I told him I wanted to be friends, but I wasn’t interested in dating. I was very clear. I said I didn’t want to lead him on. I wasn’t going to date him. He nodded and smiled and said okay, and I smiled back.
We continued to hang out every so often. When we sat next to each other on benches or couches he would slowly inch towards me as we were talking and our legs would be pressing together, and I would readjust and scoot away until I was nearly falling off the bench. I asked him to stop doing that.
One day he was dead set on a picnic early dinner in the university gardens. I told him it was a terrible idea - the mosquitoes would eat us alive. He persisted, and we went. We left ten minutes later because I was right about the bugs. Instead we just kind of wandered around campus. He pressed in close to my side and I uncomfortably realized it was kind of like a date. He told me I was pretty and that talking to me felt like talking to someone who knew everything. He looked at me with something like awe and I felt uncomfortable but told him thank you anyway. He walked me back to my dorm and made a beeline for the piano in the lobby.
He played a song for me while I sat on the chair behind him, unsure of what to do or look at or say. He got up from the bench and shuffled his feet a bit and asked me to be his girlfriend.
And I told him no. Exactly as I said before. He said “Why!” I said that I’d already told him I didn’t want to date him. He said that he thought if I experienced him taking me on a date I’d change my mind. And, well, I didn’t. After a bit more of this back and forth I told him sorry but no and he left. He was crying. I wasn’t happy. I wished he’d have just listened to me when I said I wasn’t interested, when I asked him to give me more space.
I see him around campus sometimes. We don’t talk anymore. I wish that Joe and Nathan and all the others like them could just have been my friend. I wish they valued me, my company and my friendship, over my potential as a girlfriend.
[TRADUCCIÓN ESPAÑOLA] (thanks a ton, krissyraawr!)
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when i was 5 years old my best friend was a boy named kyle who didn’t know how to knock on doors so he made dinosaur noises outside my window to wake me up in the summer until i demonstrated how to ball his fists and slam them against my doors. we collected caterpillars in my trailer park and built them houses while we traded pokemon cards. he wasn’t the only one. there was ben, and mitch, and noah–but kyle’s the only one who hurt me, because when he tried to kiss me and i asked him why, he told me “because you’re a girl and i’m a boy, shouldn’t we like each other?”
i missed him so much and i wondered why he couldn’t just be my friend like he always was
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