Poésie

Nothing More than a Friend

Dearest light of my heart, my dearest, 

I used to think of myself as a brave person. This summer at my hippie camp I really found myself, really met my people, really learned to put the truest version of my heart out there. I did brave things at camp. I told a cute boy he was cute; I snuck out at one in the morning to go to a lake with people I barely knew. There was supposedly a snapping turtle in the lake, but I decided to be brave and not care about it or be afraid of it. But overall, if you look at my track record, I'm not a brave person. I think maybe I had a psychotic break at camp, or something. I'm not brave about things that really matter. I could be brave enough to tell a boy I didn't actually care about that my body wanted to kiss him, but I can't be brave about you. I can't be brave about maybe the only person I've ever really loved.

I guess that's because love is scarier than lust. Love is a hell of a lot scarier than snapping turtles and getting caught out of bounds by camp counselors.

I'm not brave enough to tell you in person how I feel about you. I don't know if I would be able to bear the look on your face when you turn me down, when you tell me that I've got it all wrong. Maybe that's why I'm writing this instead of saying it; I know I've got it all wrong.

But listen, I've felt this way for way too long not to let you know, even if the way I'm telling you is with shitty ink on paper that I printed off a school computer. ((God, that's romantic, right?))

So here we go.

I think you're pretty great. I've written about fifty poems about you, and ninety percent of them contain shitty little one-liners that come to me in the middle of the night like "you're taking over my art as well as my mind." I adore every piece of you. I adore everything about you. I adore your flaws, your heart, your teeth, your lips, your "good morning" texts, your friendship.

Being with you, even if I'm not with you with you, is a pleasure. Being someone that you trust, that you talk to, that you even look at makes me feel lucky to be a human being. I know I don't get to be close to you in the way I want to, I feel lucky that I was born in the same millennium as you, that we live in the same state in the same country on the same planet in the same universe. Maybe we're the luckiest two people in existence.

I think about you all the time. More than I should as your best friend. That's all I am and all I get to be, probably forever, but that's okay with me. Yeah, okay, the idea of never getting to be with you makes me really sad. The fact--and yes, I know that it's a fact--that I'm never going to get to snuggle up in your arms on a sunday morning and and kiss you on the nose... well, it sucks. But I'm willing to deal with that. I'm willing to make playlists full of songs about being friendzoned and secretly being in love with your bestfriend and I'm willing to listen to you talk about girls who aren't me and I'm willing to pretend like I don't love you because being near you is worth it.

That's all there is to it.

With love and adoration,

Just a friend