I Don't Think We Actually Are. Friends, That Is. And That's A Damn Shame.

I know how big Paulie felt at the end of "Goodfellas," when he handed Henry Hill three thousand dollars and said, "And now, Henry, I have to turn my back on you."

It makes me so incredibly sad to write this post.

I am a woman of few virtues, but one that I do possess, in spades, is the ability to stare down the truth without blinking.

Even when that truth is sad and upsetting, I am forced, by my inner clockworks, to acknowledge what is true, and real, and not to deceive myself that things are anything but the way they are, rather than the way I wish them to be.

All nice words at the end aside, I don't think we really parted as friends.

All nice words at the end aside, I don't think we will really be friends.

All nice words at the end aside, I don't think we are friends.

See, even though we made all the right friendish noises, and wished each other well, and acknowledged that we started out, sort of, as friends, and hugged it out at the end, the truth is that we won't be friends.

Maybe that's why, when he dropped me off after our coffee, I insisted he get out of the car to say a proper goodbye. Maybe, in my primal lizard brain, I knew that this was a forever kind of goodbye.

It's not because I don't want us to be friends, for I could wish for nothing more. His is one of the sharpest minds, and most slashing wits I've ever encountered.

He is the kind of person that I would fervently want to call my friend. He is the kind of person I would be proud to call my friend.

It's not because of residual romantic feelings that may cloud any encounters further down the road. These too, I know, will pass. They do, after all.

It is because it is not permitted.

He told me this openly, from the beginning, that he is not allowed to have friends that haven't been vetted and approved. He smiled when he told me this. I don't know if it was the nervous smile a dog gives when it is waiting for you to reprimand it, or if it was the smile of a man who is perfectly contented to have things this way. It was some sort of baring of teeth, whatever the hell it meant.

We won't be able to do the things that friends do, like share a laugh over coffee, or have one of those 15-minute phone calls where you check in just to see how things are going. We won't even be able to trade emails in which we tell each other what is going on in our lives. We won't be able to have a drink and have those long, pleasantly rangy conversations that I like to have with my friends that veer from pants-wetting hilarity to deadly serious, the ones where you talk about the world we live in and life in general.

And all because it is not allowed.

I know.

This is a foreign concept to me, too, as so many of my friends are men whom I knew in the wild and wooly days before they got married, and now a good number are men whom I've met in the last few years who are my own age and long-married, who don't actually have to qualify their friendship with me.  Of course, there are also a couple whom upon marriage began the slow withdrawal, the gradual hurtful coldness that was essentially the bridal herd culling, or the couples that turn into permanent "we." You know them. One cannot move without the other. There is no plan with one without the other. I dunno. Why don't I respect these people?

Statistically, in this day and age, and especially at my age, it's impossible to avoid becoming friends with married men. And do married people stop making friends with people on their own upon saying "I Do?" (If that's how it's gotta be, then fuck marriage! Seriously? That is some kind of fucked up.  Is putting on a wedding ring the same as lifting the velvet rope? "Sorry, we're at maximum capacity. Fire Department regulations. No one else allowed in.")

How sad, and how limiting that is. How constricting that must feel.  I find myself looking at every person I meet and speak to with curiosity, asking myself, "Is this my next friend?" And I'm usually the slow one! (Someone said to me, a couple of weeks ago, "I tell you these things because I consider you my friend," and I was both delighted and surprised. I know the weight of the word, and I thanked him for using it.)

It is one thing to remain hidden in shadow by the choices I've made in love, but to have to do so and still pretend to call something "friendship" that isn't really friendship is false, and frankly, that's a plate of shit I'm not willing to eat.

It's insulting. And I won't do it.

I am an insightful listener.  I am smart to talk to and funny as hell. If I had a million dollars and you needed it, I would give it to you. But since I don't have a million dollars, I will give you my time, an ear, a shoulder, and a hand.

I am a great, great fucking friend.

So now you know, I have lines to draw in the sand, too.  And here, right here, this is my line in the sand.  Being friends with me should not be a shameful secret.

He would have to step forward and state, out loud and in public, "This is my friend Aileen. She's fantastic, and smart, and funny, and people like to be around her because she makes a a room seem fizzier, and bigger, and sunnier.  She is my friend, and I picked her."

And I know he won't do it.

So, in this new, seeing "things as they is" (to borrow Suzuki Roshi's words) phase of my life, I have to admit to myself the really, really, really hard truth, which is:

As much as I am capable of being friends with someone I have loved -- another one of my meager fucking virtues -- and as much as I would like it to be so, I don't believe we actually are, nor will we be, friends.

So I will just retreat, and retreat, and retreat, until I've disappeared again and become a handful of pixel dust and a few funny words sprinkled across his screen once again.

And all because it's not allowed.

And that is perhaps my biggest heartbreak of all.