"Do you remember back in freshman year, when it was supposed to snow but ended up just pouring freezing rain...?"

"I wasn't here--I was up at [my first university], until the next fall, but I was dating someone down here, and he was so mad at me for getting snow days and snow."

-----------------------------------------------------------
I'm sitting in the only open school building with a latte from the only open coffee shop and a friend I care about. We talk, and watch people outside take photos of icicles--I count them to him as they come and go. It's a Wednesday, but we don't have class because it snowed, last night, for the first time in eight years, in our town.

The theme of the day is Now and Then. Our conversation starts with a very obvious display of my total and complete distrust, which was built over years of being blindsighted with in-person meetings such as this one. It progresses when I realize that, this time, he isn't here to spring anything on me. We're drinking coffee and talking.

I am immensely relieved, but try not to show it.

He talks about habits built up throughout college, and how it's time to start taking responsibility for how unhealthy habits affect him, and I'm grinning so hard that I want to throw myself out the window beside me. The fact that he's even thinking about how he's been and how he wants to be is incredible. I'm proud. I'm beaming.

...And I'm nervous. Something about casually sitting down with him in a public place with no reassuring cuddling makes me so nervous that I blush out of nowhere and trip over my words. It's embarrassing. I'm the master of composed, and here's this perfect person, who cha-chas into my life and makes me mispronounce one-syllable words.

In a lot of ways--like this one--I almost give preference to when we were eighteen, and the world was simple, and eating right beside him was easy and not terrifying, even though that came with me liking him romantically (which, even with reciprocation, was complex enough that I am now deeply glad to be platonic). These days, we're so much more complicated and weird; I can fool myself all I want by being comfortable with him when we're watching movies or playing video games, but hell if I can't get myself together for half an hour when it's two in the afternoon and neither of us is wearing pajamas.

Every once in a blue moon, I think back to that dumb eighteen-year old girl, sitting in her papasan chair, laptop in tow, texting the boy she likes about snow...and am a little envious of how easy she has it. Meanwhile, in the present day, I sit across from the grown version of that boy and wonder if he's considered, lately, how strange our friendship has become.

You're the mistress of strange friendships!
» middaymoon on 2014-01-30 11:09:05

RE:
We were dragging it on anyway. Frankly, I'm quite okay with it since he was honest. On the other hand, he was way too honest...
» peanutmelon on 2014-01-31 12:59:44

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