Losing My Best Friend to My Ex-Boyfriend
An act of betrayal leads a writer to ponder what it means to end a friendship
Jessa always refused to use the words "best friend." I long feared her reticence masked a reluctance to fully welcome me into her life. That, in her eyes, I might be somehow unworthy of the love, praise, and hugs that I so eagerly bestowed upon her. She nurtured all of my insecurities, allowing them to fester, then grow.
I realize now, with the benefit of the wisdom that can only come once you've lived as long a twenty-seven years as I have, that this was probably my favorite thing about her.
Adam always refused to use the word "boyfriend." He courted me for months. His method involved me inviting myself over to his apartment, where we'd have weird sex that never quite satisfied me. He was, and remains, the only person I've ever truly loved.
But I realize now that what initially attracted me to him were the same things that attracted me to her.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Adam and Jessa are in love with each other.
Adam finally agreed to be my boyfriend on a sticky hot night in the summer of 2012. I fell off his bicycle and he told me everything about him. Things I didn't know because, as he reminded me, I never asked. He loved books. He was an alcoholic. He owned pants.
Is was the same night that Jessa met Adam for the first time. "He does look like the original man," I recall her saying.
I met Jessa for the first time on the campus of Oberlin College in the fall of 2006. I chased her around Northern Ohio for seven months before a heroin addiction landed her in rehab. She wouldn't return to school.
She had no Facebook or MySpace even though it was 2006. She didn't understand text messaging either. "Word alerts," she called them. We kept in touch on the phone. She'd call me at all hours of the night. She'd wake me up and I'd pretend that I wasn't asleep. I loved hearing her (possibly fake, likely exaggerated) British accented voice in my ear as I listened with wonder. She'd drone on about whatever guy had fallen in love with her or whatever country she was in that day. [...] She disappeared as quickly as she had from Oberlin, stranding me at her father's house Upstate. She'd end up in rehab again.
In her absence, I fell apart. My long-dormant Obsessive Compulsive Disorder was back and in a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big way. I needed Jessa, though what aide she might have been able to provide remains unclear.
Adam was there. He came running. Literally, running shirtless through the streets of Brooklyn to my door in Greenpoint.
Our relationship began again in earnest. A few months later, I got a phone call in the middle of the night. It was the same person who always called me in the middle of the night.
We broke up, and after a few months, Adam wants to get back together. I said no. I started dating a co-worker.
Some time between then and when we broke up, Adam and Jessa kissed for the first time, had sex for the first time, told each other for the first time - things I might not even know about. They fell in love.
Maybe they are better for each other than I ever was for either of them. Their addictions are to substances, but mine are to people like them. People whose behavior confirms my darkest fears about myself. People who give me an excuse not to be happy.
My story is a simple tale of jealousy. Or, of beating jealousy back like in the medieval dragon it is. In this story, I am Viggo Mortensen in "Lord of the Rings," and jealousy is powerless against my sword.
And this begins the way all stories of jealousy do... all great stories of jealousy... which is with my ex-boyfriend and my best friend fucking. And this is not just any best friend. This is the best friend who I would say looks like Brigitte Bardot had a baby with a mermaid. She literally had an open fungal sore on her face and Matthew Perry still asked her out.
So, um, I guess I'm not what you would describe as, like, a chill girl. I'm not like a cool, relaxed lady. Like, you would never meet me and be like, "That Hannah, she really goes with the flow like a funky youth." You would be like, "Has she snorted Adderall in the last 60 minutes?"
So when I found out about my ex-boyfriend and my best friend, um, I was weirdly calm, considering that fact. Frozen, even, you know? I tried to imagine all these horrible things, like him licking her elephant tramp stamp and sucking her tiny tit while she cupped his balls and then he sucked on her lip, which is shaped like a rosebud.
And I tried to get myself really worked up and just imagine all this horrible stuff on a loop, but the fact is that I wasn't angry, I was sad. I was sad about what I thought they knew I was. I thought they were sitting there going like, "Oh, God, Hannah's freaking out. She's gonna kill a cat and she's gonna nail it to our door. She's going to cry so hard that all of Greenpoint fills with tears and it's like fuckin' Waterworld."
And you know what? They weren't wrong. I had to fight really, really hard not to be that girl. And it wasn't easy. I thought about, um, throwing a bike through his window, but, A, he lives on the third floor. I have very poor upper body strength. And, B, he probably would have appreciated it and been like, "Thanks for the bike."
I thought about sending her a text that said, "How does the wind feel caressing your two faces, young lady?" But instead I sat and cried and thought and ate and wrote and masturbated thinking about Chris Farley, which is a thing from my childhood that I haven't fully worked through yet.
But when I heard tonight's theme was jealousy, I knew that I needed an end to my story, a real end, and that end came about 20 minutes before I arrived here when I delivered a very nice and not at all cheap fruit basket to his door, along with a note that said, "Good luck. I mean it sincerely. In perpetuity, Hannah."
'Cause that's the fact, you know? I'm Hannah forever. No matter what I do, no matter whether I, you know, start a new nuclear missile crisis with my emotions or just sit back and chill and give someone a fruit basket. I can only control the mayhem that I create around me.
But the crazy thing is that when I showed up, I heard screaming and I heard my name and I heard madness, and I knew that I was free, at least for tonight. That's all. Thank you.
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