…how did it end up like this?

I finally saw people this weekend, and realized that in what feels like a blink, so much has changed. Four weeks and nothing feels the same. Interactions are different, relationships different, suddenly I am on edge again. The hairs stand up on the back of my neck because I’m uncomfortable; things aren’t what they used to be.

The dressed-in-darkness boy is just the same, I suppose, but it’s been hinted that he wants me and I don’t want to deal. That’s fine. The way we are is easy and quiet and it can stay so long as I don’t have to deal with that.

The punk-rock girl and I, our friendship is strange. We do nothing, or we do something, and it’s never particularly special but it’s always good. Our friendship is a background kind of good, like the cinnamon smell that haunts a house in winter or the comforting hum of the air conditioning. We drank rum in the tree-field and danced and took photographs, laughing as the world lagged behind our eyes, laughing as our bodies spun and dipped with a loss of equilibrium, laughing at the sunshine and the clouds and our teenage-summer buzz. It was nice, even with sour gummi worms and crackers and water and rum sloshing in our stomachs, and aching love for faraway boys in our hearts. We commiserate, we drink, we dance, we sleep. In the morning we ate pancakes and watched MTV and said goodbye. Nothing special but always nice, but this time our friendship seemed even quieter, what with her texts to her boyscout and my waiting for a phone call and then talking for two hours so very early in the morning (or so very late at night).

And then there is the cherry bitch, and she has changed the most. Or I have, or we have – regardless of its cause, there is a change in the way things are now. I told the boy this, so late at night on the phone, and he asked me how. “She doesn’t touch me anymore,” I blurted to him. “She has her boyfriend and she’s so happy which is wonderful but also terrible because she used to write that I needed her but she needed me, too, and now she doesn’t need me but I still need her but that’s just not how it can be.” He said, “Oh.” I am crazy in the night; I ramble and rant and rave, but it’s true. She doesn’t need anymore, and I do, and our frustrated last-resort ridiculousness can’t exist anymore, because of that and the distance and that fact, the one I hate, about things changing with time. It’s an old pair of jeans, that’s all. Nonetheless, seeing her felt odd. Her house now is new and shiny and empty and everything felt oddly sterile, and we acted that way too, and I don’t want our friendship to turn into sitting-around-and-talking-about-boys but that can happen, I guess. We can watch bad tv on the couch, and talk about boys and sex, and listen to music, and be normal. That’s absofuckinglutely fine with me. It really is, because don’t I have to learn anyway to be fine with things I hate?

I’m exaggerating everything now. I know I do it, out of frustration and creativity and irritability. The therapist keeps warning me that I’m irritable, to try and cut everyone some slack. Cut my parents some slack, she says. Cut my friends some slack. When she told me this, I said, “nobody’s any good at cutting anyone any slack.”