Estranged

I’m writing this post about a boy. Not just a boy but a friend who was a best friend and now we are estranged. When I moved to NYC I didn’t know anyone. Well I knew a couple people I used to work with at JP Morgan only they lived here and I lived in Atlanta so its not like we were bestest buds. Anyway, one day I approached our receptionist and pathetically asked her to hangout with me, and luckily she agreed.

She invited me to her roommate’s birthday party. Her roommate was a guy who for several years would be my best friend we’ll call him Stephen. Stephen was funny and charming and I hung out with him most of that night. The next day I asked her if she thought he’d come over help me hang pictures and hook up my stereo (yes I’m the girl who is completely lost by wires). She said he had a tool box and loved to do boy stuff like that. He came over we hooked all the stuff up, hung pictures and I took him out for dinner and from then on we were inseparable, I don’t think I ever even hung out with his roommate again.

I met most of my friends in NYC through Stephen and there wasn’t anywhere we didn’t get invited to together. He is blond like me and I used to drag girls over to him pretending to be his sister and if we were out and I ever heard him say something like, “Mom called today…” then I knew a girl was around that he wanted to meet. He was fun and crazy, he was a huge jokester, we knew everything about each other, we traveled together, we met each others families and it wasn’t long before people started asking why we weren’t a couple. We had actually drunkenly kissed once back when we first started hanging out and never talked about it or did it again. When asked I would say neither one of us were attracted to blonds, or that we didn’t want to ruin our friendship which all were true, but also I knew he was a bit of a commitment phobe and when relationships started getting to serious he cheated or treated the girl bad so she’d break it off. We had a lot of discussions about that but I think for me I didn’t want to be the next broken hearted girl in his wake and not be friends anymore.

One night we were all out for Halloween and he left the party with a friend of mine. No biggie, I left with a hottie myself. But suddenly this girl started joining us every where we went. Most of the time he didn’t call her until after midnight and she always dropped whatever she was doing to meet up and hook up with him. I wasn’t jealous or anything just tired she was always around and kind of embarrassed that she didn’t seem to have enough respect for herself to want him to actually take her on a date.

This all went on for awhile until she and I had a falling out on my birthday. I had reservations for dinner and she said she was coming but didn’t show up, or call or anything. Apparently she’d told Stephen she had other plans (rude) at 1am she called, him not me to see if he was still out because she wanted to hook up with him. I was mad, I mean she couldn’t bother to tell me she wasn’t coming and then she called him and not me, I told him to tell her he’d meet her at her place, for her not to bother coming by then. All she would have had to do the next day was apologize, you know tell me why she said she was coming but didn’t. But Stephen told her I was upset and she decided I was in the wrong because I didn’t want her to show up after 1am. She refused to apologize and she refused to ever speak to me again. I tried to get Stephen to sort things out but apparently she would not talk to me until I apologized. Whatever the whole thing became much bigger than it ever should have but it put Stephen in a bad spot because he had to hang out with us both but not together (which was ridiculous but how she demanded things be). Stephen begged me to apologize which I of course refused to do. In the end she didn’t want him to spend any time with me and of course she won over me because, well they were having sex after all.

He and I had several talks and fights over the situation and ended up seeing less and less of each other. He ended up dating her for close to four years and during that time I not only lost my best friend, but mutual friends and family felt uncomfortable, some choose sides and I spent a lot of time broken hearted about being tossed to the side. I do know that she’d become increasingly jealous of our friendship and had asked him to break it off. In the 4 years they were together we didn’t ever completely loose touch, we emailed, sometimes we even secretly met for dinner but mostly we were out of each others lives, and we still are.

I have to admit that one day about a year or two ago I remember I was walking around thinking about the whole situation when I stopped walking and stood in the middle of the street and thought, “Oh my God I think I do like him as more than a friend!” I have no idea when that happened, I have no idea why it took him being out of my life for me to realize it, I have no idea if he’d ever felt the same way. The realization of it being too late felt overwhelming as if everyone else saw it all along and I never did. I’d had chances, he’d taken me in his arms and slow danced with me after dinner once, but I felt that it was “too soon after his recent breakup”. Once when he’d been drinking and I put him in a cab at the end of the night he opened the door and asked me to come home with him and I laughed and kissed his cheek and told him to be safe. I’d blown it, by being too cautious to take the chance and lose our friendship, I lost him and our friendship anyway.

Last Saturday I was out with a couple of friends on the UWS. We were talking about where to go next and a place called Peter’s came up. Stephen and I were regulars at Peter’s, everyone knew us there. I told them the whole story. Ten minutes later we walked into another bar right next door and there was Stephen. I was blown away! I was so amazed and I turned to my friends and said this is the guy I was just telling you about! He was with a cute girl who was exactly his “type”, she told me they used to work together. I asked him about his girlfriend and he said they’d broken up, and a few too many vodka’s made my next comment escape before I could think about it, “Why haven’t you called me?” He looked taken aback and said it had just been a month (A MONTH!) and he hadn’t been going out much. We chatted a bit more, I talked to his friend, he talked to mine and then they left for a party and we left to go to Peter’s. Part of me feels like maybe this is it, maybe this is our chance and part of me thinks that window closed long ago. The lest I can hope for is to try to salvage some part of our friendship now and I have no idea how.