This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/magilps3 on 2023-08-12 03:14:44.
I met a girl in college.
She was everything I wasn’t - tall, slender. Charismatic. She modeled. She was organized and neat. She liked cool music and had a tinkling laugh. Her mouth had a little downturn at the sides. Her eyes felt like the earth, cool and dark. Her ears were double-pierced. She studied abroad in Florence. She told the best stories. She felt vast.
Our friendship didn’t so much grow as catch fire. We were constant companions. We both had a conservative Christian upbringing, and we helped each other navigate our deconstruction. I was an atheist. She still believed, a bit - we would debate about it, sometimes. Whether there was an all-seeing god, someone who knew, someone who wanted to punish us - for drinking, for boys, for music, for smoking cigars on the patio at 3 in the morning. For running through backyards, stealing beers, sneaking into pools. We loved the stars. We wrote together.
We were used by men. We would cry to each other in the bathroom, hushed phone calls at work. There were times we wanted to die and instead of dying we walked together through the fire. There were times I felt like I was dragging her down in it.
She slept in my bed, sometimes, hair tousled and long limbs tangled in the sheets. We’d go get breakfast, go to class, put on records, dance and smoke and drink and pull each other back from the brink.
One night, I’d had too much. The concert had ended. One more beer. I tried to kiss her. I tried again. She left.
She told me something crazy happened last night, that I wouldn’t remember, that I’d laugh.
“The kiss? Oh, I remember.”
Her face was a wall. We didn’t mention it again.
As the years passed, we drifted. New boyfriends. New jobs. She started going to church again, her new boyfriend was into it. She couldn’t this weekend.
After the Radiohead concert we saved up for for a year, in her tiny clean apartment on her lint-rolled couch under an LED bulb, we fought about gay marriage. I can’t remember who brought it up. It was a sin in the eyes of god, she said. It was unnatural.
My throat felt full and hot, like choking on coals.
I left.
I didn’t mention it again.
She was getting married - everyone was asking when the wedding was, I was her maid of honor, right?
Her fiancé only looked at my nose ring when we talked. Our conversations were brief and tense. He was in law school. My boyfriend had started punching walls.
When I attended her wedding alone, her first dance song was our song. The records-stars-cigar-song. The best friend song. The pool song. The song we sang to each other on the phone in the bathroom at work when the world was burning. I didn’t know what to say. I posed for a picture - my last with her - and sobbed in the car the whole ride home. I sobbed for years. I think I still am.
She changed her number. I think she has 2 kids now, stays home. Her husband, I hear, is traditional.
I desperately hope her laugh still tinkles. I hope her mouth still turns down, just a little. I hope her eyes have depth. I hope she turns on records, late at night, and looks at the sky. I hope that here and there, she has a cigar, in secret, just for her. I hope she remembers Florence. I hope she learned to like IPAs. I hope she writes. I hope she dreams.
I hope she thinks of me, sometimes.