What I Wanted To Say : Phanfiction

Part I

Today, there was this uproarious cat video that I had found endlessly scrolling on YouTube, and it made me laugh for several minutes. It was amazing; I couldn’t stop replaying it. I wish I could have shown it to you, but you were in America, and the distances between us had driven the momentary felicity from said cat video completely away. Maybe for good. Maybe all the happiness from momentary cat videos would have only been compared to the sadness of two points on a map -- two points that represented where we were, and two points that kept us apart. I missed you quite terribly, but I didn’t say this to anyone. Anyway, I had spent the entire day on the Internet with no other reason to move, and probably consumed at least a third of our food supply in gloom and anger that you were gone.

I was going to tell you about it when you came home.

Today, I ate cereal alone at about three in the afternoon. There were bits of black flakes floating on the surface of the milk. It must have been the remnants of my black soul. I had laughed coldly at that joke, but my laughter had echoed through our apartment that for once, you didn’t fill up. So I tweeted it in a way that would sound inconspicious to hide the fact that I was actually as lonely as ever. I had too much cereal. That was the problem. There was no one that would come to steal it when I wasn’t watching and utterly reject the idea when I asked. There was no one to diminish my portions for breakfast and there was no reason to buy more when supplies dwindled so quickly. I was alone. The blackened corn flakes tasted like sadness and onions.

I was going to tell you about it when you came home.

Today, I had hosted our BBC radio show by myself. You had called before it started, and your voice sounded flat over the phone and I would have much rather preferred it to be right next to me. It was so difficult to keep the smile plastered on my face during the show, and after a while it seemed like it had already melted into my indistinct frown, treading down on forlorn and pitiable morning breakfasts. It was basically an gigantic emo radio sesson. There wasn’t anyone besides me in that booth. There was an empty space that used to be occupied by a twenty-seven year old Londoner; by my best friend. But I wasn’t going to show how desperate I felt on the inside because it was pathetic. You had only been gone for a couple of days, and I felt like turning myself inside out. What I could say is that I drew this incredibly earth-shattering lion and it was so awesome that I couldn’t have waited to show you and for you to have hung it up on the fridge.

I was going to tell you about it when you came home.

Today, I had an (explanatory) existential crisis. This one was worse than the ones I have at night. You were gone. There was no one to talk to. There was no one that I could joke and laugh with until we grew drowsy and went to bed. There was once that I had a particularly solemn thought. I had concluded, “What’s the point? What’s the point of anything I do?” I hated everything about myself that night and evidently punched a wall; the wall you and I were connected between. You had come and slowly wrapped your hands around me and whispered encouraging phrases in my ear, and like a child, you had rocked me to sleep. I felt your warmth and your kindness around me that night. And I was feeling a particularly solemn thought this night. I ahorred myself. I wanted to give up on everything. And there was no one on the other side of the wall to tell me otherwise.

I was going to tell you about it when you came home.

Today marked the start of the third week that you were gone. I was invited to a social outing once, but I had awkwardly declined. I must have been thinking that it was good to be going out and actually contributing to society for once, but they had also invited you. What was the point of going if you weren’t there? I had bullied you and said that you hadn’t counted as my friend once on camera, but it was more of the case that I couldn’t stop counting the times I had thought that you weren’t my friend. You were my everything and more. I had started to attract bad thoughts. What if I had lost you forever? What if you’d never return? That was likely. I could almost imagine you nervously stumbling around or tripping over your own shoes. Maybe you were distracted by a cute puppy you saw on the street, or maybe you were on your phone and ran into a tree or something. And for the first time in days, I smiled. I also started watching old tapes of us filming together, and was hit, like a ram running full-force into my spleen, with the achiness of missing someone. I was most likely the most pitiful man in London at that point. I was supposed to be missing my flatmate, my friend, and my business partner. I should not have been missing my soulmate, my everything; my entire world in the body of a twenty-seven year old man. I couldn’t tell the difference between them anymore. It was almost physically paining on-set, in front of a camera, to act like you were still my perfectly platonic best friend. I was never going to admit it though. I wanted to tell you how I felt, but there was always something holding me back. Obviously, there was the entire Phan scheme. It would noticably make things awkward between us, and that would result in a malevolent ruckus that would start and I’m not sure what to feel about it. There was always something that held me back. And after these few days that had seemed to stretch out for years, I wanted to tell you how I felt. I wanted to forcibly show you cat videos and things I’ve found on Tumblr. I wanted to laugh with you and eat cereal and buy multiple boxes because I know we’d run out. I wanted to be alongside you and host our radio show and watch you smile and to perhaps pretend that we would only ever be friends. I wanted to cry into your shoulder and feel your strong arms around me like a teenage girl out of a fantasy book and I wanted to knock on the wall between our bedrooms and know you’d be listening. I wanted to be with you, Phil Lester, and there was no point in denying it. So I had made a decision, and that was that I, Dan Howell, was in love and had been in love and will continue to love you until you would get tired of me.

And I was going to tell you about it when you came home.