Friendships seemed simpler in the past. In the third grade I noticed this blonde kid on the bus ride home who was in the class that I had just joined. When we got off at the same bus stop, we found that we lived a block away from each other. That was the beginning of a life long friendship. In college, my first weeks at a new school, it was pretty much the same. 

Standing in line at the cafeteria or bookstore, whoever was suffering the same long lines somehow became best friends through the shared experiences. Developing friendships in college was similar but there were some complicates. For example, a friend I played guitar with introduced me to a girl named Dee, a petite brunette, long straight hair with bangs and a button nose, who worked on the school newspaper. I guess I was going through my “girl-next-door” stage at the time because she definitely caught my eye. Needless to say, the feelings were not mutual but I thought, “Oh well, nothing says we can’t be friends.” It turns out she was in love with some other guy, and even I understand that to be a non-starter as far as dating goes.

I’d see her every once in a while at the coffee shop in the student union building and we’d pretend to study together while the afternoon crowds rambled in and out of the building. I must have been particularly studious one afternoon because she left me this little note with a drawing of a sad faced teardrop that said, “Testimony of a Teardrop. I was a teenage workaholic! (Fill in the blanks and complete the story)…” On the bottom of the note she wrote “Just k-i-d-d-i-n-g! (Kind of?)” (I still have the note).

The fall semester was drawing to a close and she started attending my church so just about every Sunday I gave her a ride in my truck. One day I noticed an odd phenomenon. Whenever we went to church she was all relaxed and we had a good time, talking and all, but as soon as we got back on campus she’d literally clutch the truck door handle and jump out the door the second I pulled up to her dorm building. This went on for a while until I just flat out asked her, during a phone call, if something was wrong. There was silence on the other end of the phone and then she said that she needed to talk to me face to face and made a date to meet me the next day by the athletic field at noon. Now, this situation had the forebodings that meant one of two things. Either this girl was absolutely sick of my face and didn’t know what to do about it or she was actually in love with me with the same confused results. Being something of a foolish romantic, I opted for the latter possibility and felt a little excited about what the next day would bring.

When I got to the field she was already there waiting for me in the bleachers. By the presence of a personal dark cloud that hung over her head on this otherwise cloudless sunny day I knew that it was option A and not B. God, I hate it when the possibilities and realities decide to duke it out in my heart. Either way I get hurt. I sat down next to her and slowly signaled my presence to her. She looked particularly torn up. After some prompting the gist of our little meeting finally poured out. Next semester she was going to be away working at a camp in Northern California and during her last few weeks in Southern California she wanted to spend her time with friends she’s known for years rather than spend time on a friendship (her’s and mine) that didn’t seem to have much of a future.

Okay, this was a new one for me. After I recovered from the initial shock of it all, I told her that I had a hard time agreeing with her assessment that just because she wasn’t going to be around the next semester that we should relinquish the possibilities of a friendship in the future or that we couldn’t enjoy the moments that we had in the present. She was somewhat surprised at my reaction. I guess she expected me to cower and melt away in the sun. She called me an optimist. That’s also a new one for me. But it seemed like such a limited perspective for someone to say, “Well, I’m going to be away for a few months and I don’t know what my life will be like, so let’s just pretend to be strangers.” That seemed weird to me, but I had to honor her decision. After all, it’s kind of hard being friends with someone who’s pretending that you never existed. 

I was more than a bit alarmed that I could be cut off from someone because of that person’s decision to follow the dictates of blind circumstances. Maybe this was just another part of my misguided willingness to compromise with the circumstances. I mean, in all honesty, what I was really interested in was dating her. But barring a change in her infatuation with this other guy (whom I never did have the displeasure of meeting) I would have gladly continued to eat the emotional crumbs that fell to her floor and wear the disguise of being just another one of her “buddies.” That particular possibility pretty much sailed out the window the day we sat in the bleachers of university athletic field. So off to Northern California she went and I slid my way through another confusing semester, solo.

The story should have ended there. She would have been justified in her decision and I would always have the future to point to as a still unfinished book. But the gods still had yet a few more twists in their knives.

A year later, sometime during the following Fall semester I ran into her on campus.  She was genuinely surprised to see me. At this stage of my life I could ill afford the luxury of saying something stupid like, “I told you so,” or even venture to wonder whether her surprise held elements of disappointment in it (as in, “I thought I was finished with that guy”). We exchanged our hellos. She was late for her class and I had to go to work. Walking along the tree lined sidewalk back to my truck I felt somewhat justified that I hadn’t cowered under and dismissed the friendship the year before. Oh, I didn’t ask her out in as much as I’d heard through the grapevine that she was still in love with the mystery man. My, how tenacious we can be at times.

Well as fate would have it her multi-year love affair with whats-his-face finally gave out and I suddenly found myself being promoted from the position of bat-boy’s backup assistant to being the lead off hitter. Things were never exclusive nor even remotely romantic, but we went out to dinner and pretended to be civilized adults. Somewhere in the middle of all of this I graduated (finally!) and invited her to my graduation and a graduation party that my parent’s were putting on for me. She couldn’t make it to the graduation but she was able to come with me to the party. A fun time was had by all (my mother later commented to me that Dee had “class,” but said it in a way that made me think she was wondering what the girl was doing with me… thanks mom).

Anyway, the educational game seemed to be over for me but Dee still had finals and the demands of a winter session that followed and all of this proved to be a bit of a strain on the friendship. Her schedule became quite cluttered and we seemed to see less and less of each other. Even the phone calls seemed sporadic.

One evening I went down to her dorm to drop off a guitar capo that I had picked up for her. We’d played music one day and I found that she was singing all of her songs in the wrong key for her voice (actually, she was quite awful, but if I tried to sing in a key that my voice couldn’t reach I’d sound pretty disgusting too). She met me in the reception area of her dorm with a hurt look on her face. Of course I wanted to know what was wrong. I mean, if there was something that I could do to help out… But she didn’t want to talk to me just then. I thought maybe if she told me what was wrong, we could at least pray about it… (‘cause that always works.) But she just wanted to get back to her room. 

Something in me snapped. I’d had it with having all of my emotional doors and windows opened for whomever decided to respond to my calls. She was no doubt justified in not wanting to discuss with me whatever it was that was on her mind. But I’d had it with offering my friendship at someone else’s convenience. I decided that if she has something that she wants to share with me than she can do the calling. So I walked out of the door of that foyer and decided to never come back. Funny, how when I stopped calling or coming around she never bothered to find out what had happened to me. Maybe leaving was what she wanted me to do all along (I know how I so complicate my friends’ lives…).

I sometimes look back on all that and wonder if walking out had been such a great idea. But obviously the relationship was doomed to a death by blind circumstances and my reappearance a year later only delayed the inevitable. And now many years later it isn’t, “Oh, she wasn’t good for you anyway” or whatever other kind of rationalization we tend to prop up against the steady stream of unconscious circumstances that eat at our need for a rational universe. I’m not thinking about that. It’s just the continual shuffle of personalities who vie for my undivided attention. It’s the cold reality that someone whom I’ve with shared my body with, brought out the intimacies of my very soul with, a lover, a confidante, a friend, would in a month’s time become engaged to another and skate off to Seattle with her new man (not Dee, I don’t think we ever got past the non-physical hanging out stage, which makes this story all the more… sad). 

“Don’t be a stranger.” “Keep in touch,” they write. When I do call it’s, “Oh, I was just thinking about you…” Or “Gosh, I’m so sorry I haven’t written.” One of my best-friend’s co-worker, Ron, got a reputation for having a bad attitude, because, according to the group of friends, “he just expected too much out of a friendship.” Ha, that comment perked up my ears. It was only a matter of time before I proved to myself that the only difference between Ron and myself with regards to friendships is that I’ve done a better job covering up the hurt and disappointment. Maybe Dee was right to attempt to prune away superfluous relationships, instead of letting unsatisfying connections endure far longer than they ever should. I don’t know if I’ve ever really learned that lesson. I guess friendships only seemed simpler in the past. JBB

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Tags: Joe Bustillos short stories, relationships, sex and the single brain cell, short stories, writing projects

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