Not long ago I fell in love with one of my closest friends.  At 33 I had never been in love before, though once or twice I thought otherwise.  Those other occasions I’d eventually decided I’d been in the throes of galactic-sized lust.  But honest-to-goodness, heart-pounding, pulse-racing, thinking-about-nothing-else, counting-the-hours-until-I-saw-her-again love?  Nope, not me.  I’m a loner by nature, happier reading a book than interacting with anyone.  I keep therapists at arm’s length.

So while friends and relatives succumbed to love and marriage and kids and houses and buying that first lawnmower, I went on first dates that did not lead to seconds, left the seat up, and dropped my socks on the floor.  When my parents moaned about my single-hood, I shrugged.  Parents worry, it’s their job.  My little brother has been married for nearly five years, has two kids, and Mom and Dad worry about him too.

In hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  A couple of friends will say I was in denial for a long time and who knows, maybe they are right.  But it was a complicated situation.

I first met The Girl eight years ago, when she started dating her Now Ex-Husband.  He was an old college buddy.  We had both moved to L.A. after graduation and spent our twenties toiling in the lower depths of the entertainment industry.  In our spare time we drank, went to parties, networked, played basketball and video games, and complained about our lives.  The Now Ex-Husband lived with his college girlfriend the first few years, but that eventually fell apart with much crying and dramatics, as happens with first loves you thought would last forever but didn’t come close.  The Now Ex-Husband dove into a maelstrom of drugging, clubbing, and general debauchery.  He smoked pot for the first time, put glitter on his face and went to raves.  He got his first cell phone to coordinate his suddenly crazed social schedule.

Eight months into his end-of-the-Roman-Empire jag, he met The Girl.  At a rave, no less.  Inside of a week he was calling to tell me that this was it, this was the One.  I was usually at work, only half-listening as I entered movie credits into a giant database.  After eight months of listening to him brag about conquests, my attitude for every phone call veered between skepticism and utter disinterest.  I told him to let me know when they were getting married, I’d buy him a blender.  That story got lots of laughs at the wedding three years later.

We took some time to warm up to each other, The Girl and I.  We were a little too much alike: brooding, reserved, insecure.  As opposed to the Now Ex-Husband, who was all id.  Rare was the impulse he would not follow.  For instance, after the college girlfriend broke up with him, he went to an animal shelter and brought home two puppies.  Never mind that he both worked and played long hours and was rarely home, or that his lease expressly forbade dogs; he needed unconditional love from some living creature right then and no amount of reality would stop him.  Sure enough, inside of a few weeks he was constantly asking friends to go to his place and feed and walk the dogs for him.

Four months after meeting, the happy couple moved in together.  I thought it might be too soon, and I secretly wondered if it happened in part because the Now Ex-Husband’s landlord was threatening to evict him unless he got rid of the dogs.  But nobody asked my opinion.  I helped him move and kept my mouth shut.

Eventually The Girl and I came around, if only because we were around each other so much.  Affection through osmosis.  I grew to respect her intellect and her instincts.  She could be funny and charming in her childlike enthusiasm.  She had great taste and the apartment often felt warm and welcoming.  It certainly beat the sad bachelor pad I shared with a struggling, going-on-forty actor/waiter. 

I won’t try to guess what The Girl grew to like about me.  All I know is that a couple of years into the friendship, she once remarked that with me, she felt like she had a brother around (she only had a sister, so perhaps this statement was naïve.)  The Now Ex-Husband howled.  Guys hate being told a girl thinks of them like a brother, he told her in his most admonishing voice.

I don’t mind, I said.  She was my best friend’s fiancée, she might as well have had OFF LIMITS tattooed across her forehead.  Had she been a cute single girl, sure, I might have hated hearing that.  But she wasn’t, and that was that.  Besides, I was three thousand miles from my own family, including my own sister-in-law.  Having someone close by refer to me as if I was family was grounding somehow.

I even spent a couple of Thanksgivings at The Girl’s parents’ house when for whatever reason I could not get back to the East Coast.  It was nice and low-key and I was happy to not have to travel.  I wouldn’t say I felt like one of the family, exactly, more like mishpulca.

So our lives rolled on.  The Girl and the Now Ex-Husband planned a small wedding.  In the spirit of keeping it small, they agreed to have a maid of honor (The Girl asked her sister,) a best man, and no other attendants.  He had a long-standing agreement with a platonic female friend that she would be his best man.  The Girl didn’t like it.  The best (wo)man lived in New York and could only come out for the wedding, so Now Ex-Husband asked for my help in planning the bachelor party.  Soon enough I took it over completely, on the theory that no one should have to plan his own bachelor party.  I didn’t much like the arrangement and was disgusted with myself for being so dutiful about the whole thing.  But it wasn’t my wedding and sometimes you have to set your ego aside.

What helped was what The Girl said to me one day.  We worked for the same company at this point and often had lunch together.  You’re the real best man, she told me.  The best man in spirit.  That was one of our bonding moments.  The Girl was a class act.  I felt that we were the adults in this little trident, while the Now Ex-Husband was emotional and impulsive, like a little kid.  The Girl and I both knew it, and we each knew the other one knew it.  But we never said anything to each other, just rolled our eyes and played along.

So the bachelor party and the wedding came and went.  Our lives rolled on.  I lost my job, went through a long period of unemployment, started grad school, struggled emotionally with the uncertainty of my life.  The Now Ex-Husband and I had a massive fight, a potential friendship-ender if ever there was one.  I don’t even remember anymore what it was about.  We made up, somehow.  The Girl shook her head and complained that we both made such a big deal out of everything.  I silently agreed, resolved to be less insecure.  Finding a new job helped tremendously.  The dogs, the only members of our circle who didn’t care, continued to climb all over me when I dropped by the apartment.

Three weeks shy of their second anniversary, The Girl asked for a separation.  The Now Ex-Husband exploded.  He could not believe it, kept telling everyone he had not seen it coming.  That was not exactly a lie, more of a sign of his willful ignorance about how adults behave.  Even I had sensed something was wrong in the months leading up to the split.  If you knew both parties well enough, it wasn’t hard to guess at the issues in the marriage.  And I knew both parties as well as anyone.

The surprise for me was where I found my loyalties.  I assumed at first I would take his side, as I had during the catastrophic break-up with the college girlfriend.  As well and as long as I’d known her, I still dropped her from my life as completely as if I’d amputated a limb.  Never thought twice about it.  I’m a Leo to the core: fiercely loyal.

But this was tougher.  For one, I liked and respected The Girl more.  For another, I’d seen the way Now Ex-Husband had behaved for quite awhile, and it was awfully similar to behavior that had led to the end of the previous relationship: laziness, an unwillingness to contribute much to the day-to-day grind that becomes the norm in marriages.  I had turned a blind eye to it the first time.  What was it George W. Bush said?  Fool me once, shame on me.  Fool me twice, uh…won’t get fooled again!

There were two events that I could point to as irreparably harming the marriage.  The first was that the Now Ex-Husband had gone to a therapist, who diagnosed him with clinical depression.  This is not an uncommon diagnosis for a person in his late twenties who is in the midst of life transitions.  People struggle.  In his case he had gotten married and gotten out of the entertainment industry and earned his teaching credentials.  He was working as a substitute teacher and supposed to be looking for a full-time teaching gig.  Never a very aggressive guy, he started looking for reasons to not look too hard.  He started using the depression as a crutch, an excuse to sleep into the afternoon, not look for a job, not clean up after himself.  He behaved like a drama queen, whining about his “crippling illness.”

Does this sound like I’m insensitive to someone who is struggling?  I suppose it could, but you have to remember how well I knew him.  When he was with the college girlfriend and unemployed, he would sleep late and spend his day playing full seasons of a baseball video game on his Playstation.  That’s a full 162-game season, plus play-offs.  He wouldn’t allow himself a Playstation anymore, so he found something else to keep him from being productive.  If the activity involved something fun, his energy level quickly perked up. 

The second event that hastened the end of his marriage was that he discovered blogging.  He was a funny guy and that often came through in his writing and through however it is that these things work a blogger in Australia came to be a fan.  Her blog was well-read itself and soon the Now Ex-Husband had what seemed like a sizable Aussie following.  He became pen pals with quite a few of them.  It all gave him validation and a sense of self-worth.  He would stay up all night reading and commenting on the Aussies’ blogs.  His first reader also had a radio show that streamed online and came on at something like three in the morning in California, and he would stay awake to listen to it.  Then he would sleep until the middle of the afternoon while his wife was at work.  It became a cycle he made no effort to break.

The final straw came when he started agitating for a trip to Australia to visit his new online friends.  They all thought it was a great idea and bugged him to make plans.  For this he had the energy to get off the couch.  But get a job and contribute financially to his marriage?  Hell no.  He had asked me for help at one point and against my better judgment, I convinced my then boss to hire him for a data-entry job.  At the last moment he turned us down.  Then a charter school offered him a full-time, honest-to-God job teaching elementary school.  The thing he had supposedly been working towards for a couple of years.  An end to substitute teaching and a steady paycheck.  He turned that down too, because the school was in an inner-city Latino neighborhood and he felt that the cultural gap would be too big to bridge. 

But he was full-speed-ahead on going to Australia.  He and The Girl agreed to go over Christmas and New Year’s.  The problem was that he wanted to go for a month and she could only get two weeks vacation from work.  So come for however long you can, he told her.  But I may as well stay for a month, since I don’t have a job to come back to.

That was it.  The Girl realized she had made a mistake.  What did he think marriage was, anyway?  It was hard work and compromise and working to build a future together.  And he showed no sign of recognizing the sacrifices that sometimes took.  So she left.

Because I saw her point of view, I found it impossible to be angry with The Girl.  Whereas my concern for the Now Ex-Husband’s state of mind was tempered.  Just below the surface, in that place my loyalty could not quite reach, lay a thicket of hostility.  It was as if during all those years of watching him behave poorly and not suffer consequences, all those years of watching as he dodged or ignored the rules as though they did not apply to him, all those years I’d felt I had to watch out for him and bail his ass out of situations his poor judgment had led him into (and the self-hatred I’d felt when I did these things), the resentment had festered and grown and now seeped up to the surface, like lava slowly boiling out of a long-dormant volcano. 

So my rebellion was to be equally concerned about both of them, to not drop her from my life as I had with the college girlfriend.  We had always chatted a lot on instant messenger during the workday (we were both underemployed and had plenty of free time,) so I checked in with her periodically those first couple of weeks:

how are you doing?

ok.  feels very strange.

yeah.  listen, if you need something, I’m not taking sides.  i mean i still consider you a friend.

thanks.

About three weeks into the separation, The Girl and I had dinner.  We sat in a Cuban place near their apartment (Now Ex-Husband was crashing in a friend’s spare bedroom) and talked for a long time about how long she had been unhappy, his shiftlessness and laziness and seeming belief that “for better or worse” exempted him from having to put in any effort to live life because he had someone to take up all the slack.

(He essentially said that to me during those crazy weeks: that The Girl had lied to him when she’d taken the marital vows, particularly the part about in sickness and in health, because here he was suffering from this crippling illness called depression and she was abandoning him, and therefore she did not take their vows seriously, whereas he did; the irony - that both had made the same promises and both had to work at it and working at it meant that if depression was really such a problem for him he had to remember to take his meds and get to his therapy appointments and generally take care of himself, all these acts of self-reliance that he almost never performed - this irony was lost on him.)

That night over Cuban food, something shifted permanently in me.  When I saw the extent to which The Girl and I shared a point of view, I glimpsed a giant wave of disloyalty approaching and I did not want to stand up against it, no matter the accompanying guilt.

The Now Ex-Husband did not help his cause over the following weeks.  He moved up his departure date for Australia to Thanksgiving, extending the trip to two months when going for one had been the straw that broke the marriage camel’s back in the first place.  I tried to advance that argument with him when she became upset at this new plan but he waved me off.  His justification to me was that The Girl was resisting marriage counseling and if she wasn’t going to do the work to save the marriage, why should he stick around?  I countered that the separation had been so traumatic that she might just need some time to let some emotions settle before she could see going to a therapist.  Of course I knew from talking to her that she saw the trip as his hiding from his responsibilities (an opinion I shared) and I was sure if he went, that was the end of the marriage and no amount of counseling would put it back together.  He waved off this as well.  As he had done so many times, he was giving up on something after making only the barest of effort at it.

I should note here that he still had no idea how much communication I had with The Girl.  When he asked if I talked to her I minimized it as the occasional online chat, maybe one phone call back in the very beginning.  Even now I’m not sure why I lied.  Maybe I was afraid of his temper, which had a hair trigger in the best of times.  Maybe I thought he would be jealous that my relationship with her was strong while his was in tatters.  Hell, maybe I was worried he would read my continued contact with her as me moving in on his wife when they had not yet officially pulled the plug on the marriage.  That was how a couple of my friends – and even my own family – seemed to read it.  I quickly grew tired of defending my motivations as honorable and driven by genuine anger and disappointment with my friend.  Though whether this anger and disappointment was related to resentments that had slowly accreted in our friendship like oil in a drip pan under an old car was not an issue I wanted to examine.  Maybe I didn’t need to.

While the Now Ex-Husband had been in town I was paranoid that he would discover my budding friendship with The Girl.  A couple of times when we had made plans for dinner I had expressed worry that we should not go to a restaurant he was likely to walk into.  She pooh-poohed my concerns.  And now that he had left for Australia The Girl and I were free to pursue our friendship.  We hung out at her new apartment, went out for dinner or brunch maybe once every week or two, and went to the old apartment to visit the dogs, that were being cared for by a house sitter.

I remember distinctly dropping by there with her one night just before the Now Ex-Husband’s return.  Those dogs were remarkably friendly even for dogs (read: attention whores) and they had always particularly loved me.  I was in fact (according to their owners) the boys’ favorite visitor.  When I would come by they would jump on me and not leave me alone until I’d sat on the floor or the couch and allowed them to thoroughly lick my face, which could take some time. 

On this night they barely noticed me, so excited were they to see The Girl.  And I had never seen her play with them the way she did that night, crawling on the floor, pretending to throw their favorite stuffed animal across the living room and then hiding it behind her back, giggling as the dogs searched and searched for the thing.  The sight of all this, charming as it was, filled me with sadness; with the Now Ex-Husband’s imminent return, some chapter seemed to really and truly be ending.

The Girl must have sensed this as well, and after playing with the dogs for awhile she burst into tears with such suddenness it was as if someone had flicked a light switch from OFF to ON.  I found a box of Kleenex and sat quietly while she sobbed and the confused dogs took turns sniffing her face.  We didn’t talk about what she might have been thinking that set her off.  Later I drove her back to her new apartment, gave her a hug, and continued onto my own home.  I distinctly remember feeling angry and resentful of the Now Ex-Husband, thinking that he should have been the one finding her Kleenex and rubbing her shoulder and asking if she was going to be okay.  But as was typical with him, he had created a mess and left it to me to clean it up.  I was even angrier with myself for actually doing it.

Despite all that, I still worried over how I would handle his return.  My intention was to no longer keep my opinions about his decisions and behavior to myself, but this conflicted with my natural desire to avoid confrontation at all costs.  I didn’t know if I could be strong enough to declare myself no longer the milquetoast caretaker who had my friend’s back no matter what.  It was a perversion of the dynamic.  The day his plane landed I was one of his first calls.  Luckily I was headed for a family wedding on the East Coast so I had a few days’ reprieve from confronting the situation.

Then The Girl took it out of my hands.  While having lunch with the Now Ex-Husband that weekend, my name came up and she told him that I had become one of her closest friends.  Threw it in his face a little, in my opinion, part of that thing couples do in break-ups, where they look for ways to jab each other.  Though maybe my reaction was just my usual aversion to confrontation. 

In any case, he avoided me for some time after I returned from my cousin’s wedding.  When we finally did make plans to get together, he stipulated ahead of time that we would not talk about the marriage.  We went out for dinner and talked all around it.  He told me stories from Australia, stories I had no real interest in because of my opinion that he never should have taken the trip in the first place.  But I didn’t bring up the marriage, which was now by mutual agreement in the process of being legally ended.  Nor did we discuss it a couple of weeks later when we spent an evening with three other friends crashing someone’s birthday party at a bar, then getting high and attending a midnight comedy show, of which, funny as it was, I have almost no memory.

And though both those outings went well, I never saw the Now Ex-Husband again.  A few months later, with the divorce still pending, he moved up to San Francisco, where he had lived for the first seven years of his life.  In those months I never heard from him that I recall, until right before Christmas when he emailed to retrieve a guitar he had left at my apartment a couple of years before.  I never called him, never emailed.  I read his blog periodically; usually his posts were full of pity for himself and venom directed at The Girl, in attacks I found impossible to stomach.  So I avoided him, let him lie in the bed I felt he’d made.

In addition, he had held up the processing of the divorce papers by first implying he might seek alimony and then demanding a settlement of $30,000 (The Girl had won a long-standing lawsuit against one of the Big Three automobile companies early in her marriage and had some never-disclosed amount of money squirreled away.)  You can probably imagine how well the Now Ex-Husband’s demand for a large chunk of this settlement went over with The Girl.  I heard all of her rants on the issue.

One night, just a day before he emailed me about the guitar, the Now Ex-Husband went looking for a vegetable peeler.  Instead of the good one he had bought at some point after he moved in with The Girl, he could only find an old, rusted peeler that was of practically no use.  He concluded that The Girl must have taken the good peeler when she had moved out a year before, and this sent him over the edge.  He fired off a nasty email to her, which resulted in an angry exchange that ended when she told him to only contact her through her lawyer from then on.  He responded by writing a long, angry blog post in which her taking the vegetable peeler became a symbol of every one of her character defects and everything that she was doing to fuck up a timely and fair divorce settlement (fair in his mind being defined as a large check – another unsurprising development considering his history of laziness and continued hope that he would one day just luck into a large pile of money.)  This was just the penultimate piece of information that I’d received over the months (the rest of it being second- and sometimes third-hand from mutual acquaintances) that he was wallowing in dramatic self-pity and making little if any effort to get up off the mat.

I happened to read this blog post the next morning, just before I read his email about the guitar.  I wrote back that I would drop the thing off on his doorstep one morning on my way to work, but based on the whole vegetable peeler incident, I would prefer not to see him just then.  I was in the midst of finishing my grad school thesis, beginning the final push to graduation in four months, and I did not want any part of his dramatic and clearly unhinged life.

When he finally left for San Francisco not much later, a weight fully lifted from my shoulders.  But something still felt wrong.  I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I was long past guilt over my disloyalty to our friendship.  For one thing I had no desire to try for any kind of reconciliation.  And how could I beat myself up for taking a moral position over his behavior?  I had chosen based on my own value system, even if it cost me my best friend.  I was, to put it simply, proud of myself.  We Leos have boundless arrogance to go with the fierce loyalty.

During that year between his return from Australia and move to San Francisco, The Girl and I continued our close friendship.  We took yoga classes together and talked online constantly, shooting each other links to interesting sites or pictures or videos.  We called each other whenever one of us spotted a new Pinkberry under construction.  Oh, we loved Pinkberry.  It is truly crack for people who have given up hard drugs. 

It was a good relationship.  Better than good.  And being something of a loner, I don’t have a great deal of patience for most people.  Romantic relationships never last more than a month or two.  My friends always seem to call or email or IM at a bad moment.  But not The Girl.  She was the only friend who could cheer me up just by saying hi.  It was the most emotionally intimate relationship I’d had with a member of the opposite sex in many years.

People who knew the situation kidded me constantly.  My brother would call and ask how my girlfriend was doing.  My parents wondered aloud what was going on.  A couple of different bosses heard me on the phone making plans with her and quizzed me endlessly about the relationship.  I grew exhausted defending myself, explaining that anything that happened between us would have happened for the wrong reasons, that we were a little too much alike, and not each other’s type at all.  These were not cheap justifications.  I fully believed if I had ever made a pass at her, it would have been more out of anger at the Now Ex-Husband.  I also truly believed we were not much of a match: she’s not into the quiet bookworm types, I usually go for girls who are, frankly speaking, much bigger nerds.  We were good friends but that indefinable It that good couples have, that romantic spark, was not there. 

 And beneath all of that lay the potentially boundless self-loathing I would feel if I started questioning my original motivations for taking her side and concluded I’d been romantically interested all along.  How much of an asshole would I be to have taken advantage of my best friend’s marital woes to move in on his wife?  Good Lord, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed for shame.

Still, the idea wormed its way into my head and set up camp.  I started wondering, well, was this really a bad idea, or was I just scared and inventing justifications as cover?  What if we’d be better than I thought?  I started wondering what she was thinking, started looking for signs.

For instance: we were both on eHarmony for a time.  A friend of hers had told her it was a pretty good dating site, so she tried it and talked me into giving it a shot.  For anyone who does not own a TV and has never seen those hideously annoying commercials with happy couples mooning over each other, eHarmony works like this: you answer pages upon pages of questions and the site matches you with people it thinks you would, based on each other’s answers, be compatible with.  When I signed up, the first batch of a half-dozen or so matches included The Girl’s sister, whom I’d known for years.  The Girl and I got a good laugh over that.  But it’s strange, she said after we’d both been on eHarmony for a couple of months, that you and I never got matched up.

I shrugged and suggested that maybe we’d make a lousy couple.  But inside I wondered: was she hoping we’d get matched up?  Was she looking for signs as much as I was?  If so, I couldn’t see any other signals.  She had hit the dating scene with a vengeance after the divorce.  At the time we had this conversation, she had been seeing a TV editor she’d met on eHarmony, and she seemed to like him quite a lot.  Early on it looked like it could in fact get quite serious. 

At the time I was a few weeks from the end of grad school, scrambling to finish my thesis in time.  Plus my company was being sold and I was not sure if I would have a job after the end of June.  And still I thought about this all the time.  I was becoming obsessed.  I kept telling myself part of it was my self-proclaimed loner status; if I had more people in my life thoughts of her would not dominate.  I became insecure; if I didn’t hear from her for a few days, I was sure she was slipping away from me.  Because I had sacrificed my friendship with the Now Ex-Husband to maintain a friendship with her, I believed, deep down, that we had no business being friends in the first place.  So I was either looking for signs that it was coming to an end, or I was looking for ways to sabotage it myself.

And that was what I ended up doing, really.  We were having dinner one night (ironically at that same Cuban place where we had had our first meal after she and the Now Ex-Husband first separated) and I was distracted, down.  Graduation was past and the thesis was in, I had just been offered a job with the new company that had bought the old one, so I didn’t have any more excuses for distractions.  She had been going on and on about the TV editor but stopped at the look on my face.  She asked if I was okay, and I told her, more or less: I’ve been thinking about you and me.  About our friendship and whether it’s possible it will ever be anything more than just friends.  And I feel terrible about it because I don’t think you are into the idea and I’m afraid I’m going to fuck up our friendship and I won’t be able to be a source of support for you in the future the way I have been for the last nearly two years.  But I’m having some more-than-friends feelings for you.

Well, I got pretty much the response I expected: I’m sorry, I hate to think I’m hurting you, but I don’t see it, though I love you as a friend, etc. etc.  I accepted that, told her not to worry, I would be fine.  I believed it, too.  I figured this was a silly crush, and she and I had been friends for a long time before and could be friends for a long time after.  I was still down when we said our good-byes in the restaurant’s parking lot, and I knew I would need to stay away from her for a bit, but all in all I thought I would get over it.

So life went on and I tried to set aside my insecurities.  We continued to communicate, she and I, and we got together periodically, though with much less frequency.  We had brunch a few days after the TV editor broke up with her and I listened to her wistful recounting of the relationship and didn’t say anything stupid like: so, now can you and I get together?  I tried to get back to the way we had been before.

But there was no going back.  And that only made it worse for me.  Because if I had thought she was slipping away before, now I was sure of it.  And she was deliberately keeping her distance, I suspected.  The number of phone calls and instant messages had tailed way off. 

I tried to forget about it.  I went back to eHarmony, but my heart wasn’t in it.  There was something wrong with every girl: too tall, too dippy, lousy punctuation, too many LOLs in her profile, her favorite book was The Da Vinci Code.  In the back of my mind, this little voice kept reminding me that I already had someone in my life whom I cared about deeply, who was smart and funny and fascinating and sexy and utterly beautiful.  I reminded the little voice that in my experience a girl who says she loves you as a friend is not likely to change her mind.  A couple of female friends I had confided in said the same thing.  Still, the little voice refused to shut up.

The Girl was by now dating someone new.  The Musician.  Some guy who lived in Silver Lake and had tattoos and sang in a band that had actually had a record deal with one of the major labels.  She liked this one a lot, I could tell.  He was the first guy she’d dated since the Now Ex-Husband whom she referred to as her boyfriend.  We were having sushi one night when she was telling me about him and I felt my mood slipping.  Why was I anywhere near this girl?  Being around her now just made me sad.  Not being around her made me sad.  The rare occasions when we talked made me sad because we didn’t talk as often as we used to and were not as close as we’d once been.  I tried to get used to the idea of her being so much less a part of my life.

Around the end of May, I logged onto Facebook and saw that she had posted some pictures.  Pics of the Musician with his long hair and white teeth.  Pics of The Girl on a recent family vacation, sailing around the Caribbean.  Pics of her and the Musician snowboarding up in Mammoth.  I had tried to talk her into going snowboarding for years because I knew she’d enjoy it, and she’d always been reluctant.  In the snowboarding pictures she was smiling broadly, giddily.  I could not remember the last time I’d seen that smile.

And in every goddamn picture, she looked more beautiful than she had ever looked in all the years I’d known her.  I had always thought she was cute, but now she looked like a knock-out.  I could not breathe.  My heart literally skipped a beat (first time I’d ever truly understood that expression,) my stomach became so upset I barely ate anything for twenty-four hours.  I was shaky and nauseous and could not concentrate on my work the rest of the afternoon and all the next day.  I wanted to curl up in a ball and die from longing and loneliness.  I had been trying to talk myself out of this little crush for months, but now I saw it really was more serious than I had ever wanted to admit.  I could not kid myself any longer: I was well and truly in love with this girl, and had been for who knows how long. 

I spent the next couple of days drafting a long email telling her about what had happened.  Maybe I was a coward for not calling, for not telling her face-to-face.  I just could not stand the thought of the “I love you as a friend” speech again.  In person, again.  Unless she had had a change of heart, I didn’t want to talk to her.  I just wanted to crawl away somewhere and lick my wounds.

The email went through several drafts and endless tweaks.  It could have just been an exercise, something I wrote out to get all this out of my system and then dumped in a drawer.  But I always knew I was going to send it.  I needed to remove her from my life for a while, if not forever.  I didn’t want to keep getting occasional instant messages babbling about nothing, as if things were still the way they used to be.  I didn’t want things to be the way they used to be, I wanted something more. 

I told her all this.  I also told her I didn’t expect her to respond, that I would understand.  I told her I loved her.  Then I sent the goddamn thing late on a Friday night and went to bed.

Despite my telling her I didn’t expect a response, I still hoped for one.  When days went by and none was forthcoming, I started kicking myself.  How had she reacted to this email out of the blue?  Had she been hurt?  Angry?  Upset?  Annoyed?  Had she cried?  Rolled her eyes and said Oh Jesus in her inimitable way?  I imagined her showing up on my doorstep to yell at me.  Maybe I thought I deserved to be yelled at.

After two months, I sent her a birthday card.  Don’t know why.  My birthday was four days before hers and she did not send me one.  I guess I was fishing for a response.  Testing the water.  She responded and thanked me for the card and said she hoped I was well.  I wrote back and said I was well except for the times I missed the hell out of her.  This led to a whole exchange in which she told me she didn’t think we should be in touch yet, it was too soon, I needed to move on more completely, she hoped we could be friends again in the future but we needed to be on the same page blah blah blah.  I agreed, told her I hoped so too.

That was almost five months ago and though I still think of her often, I’ve not called or written.  I’ve mostly removed her from my life, though I still use a keychain she gave me.  It took some time, but I even deleted her name from my instant messenger buddy list.  That one hurt. 

I had thought for a while that there would be some magic point I could reach at which I’d be over this whole thing and she and I could renew our friendship.  But what I have discovered is that as much as I miss the friendship, I do not want to renew it.  I do not want to go back to being the non-threatening, brotherly, I-love-him-as-a-friend friend.  That’s such a cliché, isn’t it?  Quiet and shy guy secretly in love with one of his closest friends, a beautiful and bubbly girl who, oblivious to his feelings, dates a series of guys the shy friend thinks are total douchebags.   I can’t go back to being that guy.  Bad for the ego.

So here I am at the end of it all, minus my two once-closest friends.  What to take away from all of this?  Never fall in love with a friend’s wife even is she is an ex, I guess that’s one lesson.  Never miss an opportunity to tell someone how you feel about her, that’s another.  Never deny what’s in your heart.  Live life in a forward-moving direction.  Watch out you don’t fall into the friend trap with a beautiful woman, it will only lead to heartache.  Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.  All the things I knew beforehand but let happen anyway.

And to hell with the circumstances of how we met.  What does it matter now?  If there is a positive to take away, a silver lining in this cloud, it is knowing that I can love someone that deeply.  I had never even understood the concept before, had often asked married or at least committed acquaintances: how do you know?  No one ever has a good answer.  You know when you know is the gist of every response.  For the first time in my 34 years, I get what they are saying.