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Sparkle (1)
"I forgot how tall you were!" I say when he approaches me, standing at the end of the bar waiting for my Americano to be served. I rise on tiptoe to greet him.
I don't think about the gesture before it unfolds. Kissing is how I greet most people I know well. But he's not "most people" -- and as my cheek moves to meet his, my body pauses as if, having passed his lips, my own seem to suddenly remember that this is the only reasonable destination. The hesitation only lasts a nanosecond, but when our cheeks finally touch, both are burning hot with a nameless transgression.
Let's just be friends. I would never utter those words. Friendship to me is not a consolation prize to give out to people who fail to meet my standards. If I can't even agree to dinner with you, there is no way I am going to want to hear about your neuroses, help you move, or let you crash on my couch because you don't feel like being alone that night.
At a cafe via Shutterstock.
The dreaded phrase even affects the people who didn't get axed after a first or second date. "Let's just be friends," makes a transition from lover to friend sound easy, like friendship is a natural progression once a relationship concludes. This is quite possibly the greatest deceit our species has concocted to date. Friendship is built, stone for stone, from the foundation up. It may be the purest and most beautiful thing we have achieved as social creatures, and the closest we will ever come to unconditional devotion and loyalty.
Love is a process, too, but it is built with a different blueprint. While endowed with words like "eternal" and "unconditional," the devotion and loyalty associated with love are very conditional. There is forgiveness, of course, but love is demanding in a way that friendship is not. Friendship is built like houses near fault lines -- able to take on quakes as the plates of life tremble and shift. Love, on the other hand, tends to be built like a citadel to stand solid against invasion.
They are completely different things. To imagine that you can easily repurpose a fortress to stand the comings and goings of life, with all the tremors and turbulence that it entails, is to set yourself up for collapse. This is especially true if said fortress suffered structural damage during a breakup.
And yet there we are. Having coffee in the middle of what had been, up until this point, a typical weekday.
We quickly put space between the awkward greeting and the present. The ease into which we fall into conversation is surprising. I remember a bright-eyed Pollyanna reassuring me just this morning: "how can you not be able to be friends with someone who knows you so well?" But knowledge doesn't make friendship a certainty. If this were true, we'd all be best of friends with our therapists, hair stylists and manicurists. And yet we're not.
And then there is the danger, clear and present at all times. He doesn't look like a threat. But his jaw, his perfect jaw, is a threat. His mouth is saying nothing inappropriate, but his lips -- those lips don't need to say a word to be a threat.
Suddenly, a memory accosts me. A dark lounge poolside. "You could get me into trouble with words like that," he'd said. I'd smiled and leaned closer, "I could get you into trouble with one whisper."
Emotional time is not linear. You feel, therefore you are. At that moment in a coffee shop sitting with an old lover, I am also sitting at a bar with a man I am only now beginning to know. Common sense immediately rebels against the disorder, but curiosity placates it with Heraclitus -- surely if one cannot step twice into the same river, one cannot drown twice, either? That's when logic intervenes with an extensive discourse on the greats' understanding of time.
Just as pain lets the body know that it has suffered physical injury, intellectualizing alerts me of emotional injury. I snap back from my sojourn through the pre-Socratics, Plato, Spinoza, Descartes, and Leibniz and realize I am sipping coffee, staring vacantly at his hand as he waves it in front of me.
"Where did you go?" he asks me with a laugh.
(That laugh! How long has it been since I heard that laugh?)
I could tell him -- I'm sure time
