#kc11

With you, I always seem to be surfing on waves of emotion, uncertain whether the next wave will take me off my back or not. 

I try, but you...just don't seem to be someone I can cast out from my life. I thought last summer would erase any lingering tenderness I ever held for you. I thought I could never let you hold such an important place in my life again, thought I could never love you the way I used to. 

I thought that I would stop caring so much, that it would stop mattering the things you did, and that I could be resigned to your occasional indifference and my lack of priority in your life. 

But a year has come and gone and seeing you still brings the same anxiety and anticipation to my life. You are as important as you have ever been. And I still await your attention when you are present, still feel the same need to monopolize your time. 

With you I never have any definite answers. Not from you, not from myself. 

For a while every post was about you. And you filled my life with a lot of joy, a lot of happiness. I said before that I would follow you to the ends of the earth, and your company alone was enough. 

When you dreamt your big adventures, I dreamt along with you. You would describe your visions as you saw it, mountains and mountains of possibilities. And no matter how much your world differed from mine, I told myself it would be okay, because you would never leave me behind. 

When I was with you, I have always been a little more than me. With you, there has never been something I cannot do, cannot be. And when people meet me with you, it strips away all of the crafted personas and reputations built for over the years. And for a moment I am me, and all I am is the best friend that sticks with you through all the crazy things you do. 

I loved that reputation. Loved the freedom you gave me to be whatever I wanted to be. Loved that you liked me, no matter who I ended up becoming.

I loved you. Whether it be as a friend, as family, even I cannot identify. 

But somehow no matter how hard I have been searching, how much I have tried to let others fill my life, there's still this oddly shaped imprint that no one else's shoes can fill. And I can't shake the odd loneliness that seems to have grabbed me since last year.

I blame you for a lot of things that have happened since last year. I blame your temper for getting the best of you, for unleashing a kind of nastiness that I never thought I'd see. I blame you for the way you saw your responsibilities to me, as a obligation, the weight to hold you back. The way you saw your time away from me as freedom, the way you arranged your activities around the obstacle I posed. I blame you for all the times you left me waiting, for lunch, for dinner, for you to come back. For all the times I worried as you had fun, and I trailed like an abandoned afterthought. I blame you for all the things you won't tell me, the same secrets you know are standing in the middle of our friendship. The ones that make you turn your back on me to hide, that leave our conversations full of weighted heavy silences. 

But most of all, I blame you because you left me holding nothing. I left with my best friend, with visions of an epic adventure, kodak moments of happiness, and the promise that we would do it altogether. 

Somewhere along the way, I lost my best friend to handfuls of strangers. People you had never met, and some that you will never meet again. And I don't know who they were, nor how wonderful they were. Only that thousands of hours of friendship still seem to pale in comparison to the excitement they can pose, and you left me picking up the pieces of shattered visions by myself. 

I can fault you for so many things, but I can't, knowing who you are, what you're like. I can't fault you for the things you never asked for, and all these years I have tried to mold you to the image of what I thought you should be. I wanted our friendship to be picture perfect. For us to be inseparable, storybook best friends. I wanted it to be us against the world, to see the world together. But most of all, I wanted you to need me as much as I needed you. 

And I always thought that if I gave enough, if I fought hard enough, it would all eventually become reality. And I thought if I ingrained myself into your life enough, it would matter when I wasn't there. 

I'm afraid of being lonely. Who isn't? And since I was little I have always been afraid to be by myself. When I am, I imagine all the visible and invisible monsters of this world, and I scare myself with their imagined existence. 

Last summer, lonely was trudging across the street for dinner after another disappointing text, too tired to walk any farther to fend off advances from random men. It was waking up alone and realizing you never came back, and never texted or called. It was taking a taxi to the Jakartan festival alone, no idea where I was or where I was going, and you being too distracted to remember to call me back. It was sitting across from you in silence as you tapped away on your phone all lunch, all dinner, and listening to your feeble excuses of why you weren't going to be around the rest of the night. 

So I can explain away our absences from each other as the need to take a break, the idea that we tired of each other's company. 

We saw each other so many hundreds of hours before that, and it never happened then. 

I stopped making time for you because I stopped knowing what I was supposed to be. Because I'm too afraid to be left behind again, too afraid to be pushed aside once more. 

I don't want to never be important enough again. I want my opinion to matter enough to change your life. I want you to care enough to chase my time. I want you to not want to leave me behind, to prefer my company over theirs. I don't want to keep being the second option you keep open, the person you call last minute when you have free time. I want you to miss me, to discover that I made a difference in your life. I don't want to be left not sure what I am coming back with once more. 

I can't have you be so important and be abandoned once again.

It's always been like this with you. Sometimes you make me so angry, so unhappy. And I tell myself I will never let you hurt me like that again. And I will never let you have the ability to upset me. 

And this time around, I won't let you be so important.

But then I see you and you're everything I remember. And you're just as funny and capable and you laugh at everything I expect you to, and you ask the questions that always made me feel like you cared. 

And even if it was only because of a wrong turn, the fact that you came to visit me at all still crumbles at my facade of indifference. 

You come in and my mom greets you and you sit on the couch like you have a thousand times before, and my dad comes in and pats you on the shoulder, and it's like even after all this time they still acknowledge you as one of my most important people. 

I ask you when you're free and I know your words are an empty promise, but it seems like you will try, and for a moment I just want to believe them anyways.

In the end all my indifference is for show, and of all the things you evoke from me it has never been apathy.

Sometimes when you speak of promises and all the places you will take me, all the things we have yet to do, I get caught up in your fantasies and imaginations. 

And for a moment I'm once again ready to follow you to the end of the world, just as I was once last year. 

But you showed me last year where all your promises would lead, to piles of empty words and disappointment. And sometimes I just want to understand why I still want to believe you, why I am so convinced by your convictions. 

I know you, and you know me. And we will forever be familiar, and we will work, like an oiled machine. But what does it mean, for everything to run so smoothly if I can never count on you to be there?

Birthdays haven't always mattered to me. They didn't used to, and you were the one who made me feel like my birthday should be special. And you are the person that I spent both of my last birthdays with, this day that is supposed to  be so special. 

And I don't begrudge you of your own life, the busy things you do. You will always have a legitimate reason for canceling on me. 

But I wanted you there. And it mattered that you weren't. 

Why is this a trend with you? Why are there always so many moments left in silent disappointment, and you don't seem to realize it at all? 

Eventually you will call and it will be like nothing ever happened. And it won't matter that you didn't show, and it will be no big deal.

I forget that I missed you, sometimes. I forget that I enjoy your company, that you make me laugh, make me talk, and time flies by in your presence.

I thought, maybe, with time, your position and your place with me would change. That perhaps what you have been, is a coincidence, a fluke. And maybe over time, others would take your place.

But no one seems to be able to take your place, to be close to being able to take your place. And even when I haven't seen you, haven't spoken with you, your presence is still ever familiar.

This has always been the place that I write down the things that touch me the most, that hurts me the most. The things I will remember a year from now, two, and the things I could never say out loud the same way.

It's always been a sanctuary except when it hasn't been. And this was the one places that heartaches and those unnamed feelings found a reason and a name.

So it's funny and maybe not funny that you, who have taken up so much of the last few years of cyberpages and so much of my time, can bring me so much worry and yet not yet have a space here. 

Because for years I have been ready for a day when I will post about you in past tense. And I am afraid to because it means giving up.

Writing has always been my way of understanding things, of telling myself where it began, where it ended.

Except when I look at the empty white space, and I pause to let my mind fill with words, I realize I am not ready to understand what, or why this is happening. And I'm not ready to stop pretending that this isn't necessarily the beginning of the end.

I am not ready to sit and reminisce on my memories of my times together, to hold each one and savor both the bitter and the happy. And I am afraid to explore exactly what mark you are leaving in my life, or to understand how much reign I gave you in my life.