THOSE WHO SUFFER LOVE
When we were 17, we sat on the beach late at night, and watched teenagers in prom dresses stumble drunkenly out of the bath house. I pressed my feet into the sand and cried and said, "I just don't know what's going to happen, I just don't know what's going to happen anymore." And you didn't say anything- you just offered me some potato chips.
The night my mother dropped me off at college for the first time in a foreign city and told me that she was divorcing my father and moving away as she drove away from the dormitories and handed me a letter from my father that said, I know you know things haven't been going well, I called you both a hundred times, I left you a hundred messages, because you were the only ones I could call. Because I had known you for 15 years, and you were my best friends, and I had just arrived at someplace new. And neither of you even called me back. You didn't even call me once. Not once.
Last summer we sat in a Mexican restaurant on the ocean in San Diego, underneath the night sky, and you told me about your troubles and I said, "I just have to get out of here" and you asked them to turn up the radio.
I called you this year, when we were both in the same town, to come talk to me, to see what my house had become, and you said that you didn't want to because it would be "too depressing" for you.
I'm trying to be realistic, but this is fucking ridiculous. I have no context for how to handle you anymore.