FWD: hello hello

Hey there,

I see that you are coming to *** tonight. This is stating the obvious, but this will be our first interaction in a long time. I wish I could say that I'm excited to see you but, to be honest, I'm predicting it will mostly be uncomfortable instead. And again, maybe I'm stating the obvious, but this is why: I have a hard time understanding why we're not really friends anymore.

What is prompting this message is that I have a hard time not speaking when something is on my mind. This is especially true these last few weeks - I have been feeling more present, aware, and introspective than usual, so my emotions don’t have to travel far to get to the surface. It keeps things exciting.

So...here we are. I’ll be seeing you soon and, seeing how we haven’t really spoken since ***, I expect it will be awkward. For me, at least. Is it safe to say you feel this too? I mean, we used to find time to periodically catch up over tea and now we barely make eye contact in the *** hallway. And maybe this OK with you. For me, it sucks.

I don’t mean for this message to be an attempt to return things to the way they were before we dated. To be honest, I think that would be overshooting it. I’d be happy with seeing you randomly and just having it be comfortable. Hell, if we accidentally started having an active friendship, even better. But to be painfully honest, I've learned to not expect too much. Any time I've communicated over the last several months, your response has been polite but never encouraging of more conversation. So I stopped communicating and tried to let it go. Apparently, I’m not very good at that. What is lingering for me is this question of why - why aren’t we really friends anymore? Maybe asking this question won’t actually change anything on the outside. Maybe answering this question isn’t as important as me just saying it out loud. Maybe, like a cathartic journal entry, I just need to say, “Hey, this is what is going on for me.”

Perhaps this is naive of me, but I am of the line of thinking that the discomfort we feel after breaking up with someone, especially if friendship precludes the romance, is very small compared to the caring connection that underlies all of it. This has certainly been my experience of relationship the last few years: we feel discomfort - sadness, anger, frustration, etc. - and then, eventually, it goes away. What is left is still a larger sense of caring and, in my experience, the friendship is often closer and more authentic than when it started. I - optimistically - thought that would happen with you and me. I even thought it would be relatively easy. But here we are.

So this is what is going on for me. Seeing how this morphed into a cathartic journal entry rather than a message to you, I would be grateful - and certainly curious - to get a response but I am also grateful to just be heard. Knowing how emotionally vocal I’ve been feeling, I think it would be difficult to see you tonight and not have an opportunity to share some of this. So whatever happens will happen. Discomfort will be discomfort and life will continue to be emotional, unpredictable, and highly amusing.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Truly grateful. And know that, even among a tangled mix of discomfort, I can often still tap into the underlying sense of caring.

***