J.

I have this friend. I wonder that I even call him that, sometimes. Since we've been children, it seems like we've devoted as much time to hurting each other as we have to being friends.

If you were to ask either one of us, we'd say that it's not our fault, that the other is too sensitive/insensitive, depending on the situation. He would argue that I say deliberately contemptuous things. I would insist that he never listens to what I'm saying, but hears everything through the shield of his own self-loathing. He would say that he has been one of my best friends, always. I feel that I have been as good a friend to him, as he has been to me.

If we were both honest, we would admit that for every kind deed we have offered, we have been repaid with cruelty. The very reason our acts of kindness to each other are so unexpected is not because they are rare--we have often been surprisingly kind and empathetic to each other--but because they are just as likely to turn into acts of malice before they are finished. We have apologised and made-up a hundred times, we have gone years without speaking, we have been reunited on half a dozen occasions; and at base, nothing ever changes.


I am not stupid. I KNOW the most prudent course of action is to just let him go. I know that if I hang onto him, he will continue to wound me, and I him. And I will do what I must.


And what I must do, is hold onto him all the more tightly. I have loved him all my life, and will not lose another friend. Not him. It's not worth it. I would rather eat humble pie every day for the rest of my life, I would rather field every tantrum he can throw at me, I would rather apologise for imagined slights every time I open my mouth, than to never speak to him again.


He is more dear to me that he could ever believe. I wish our relationship didn't have to be this way, but I accept that it is. I accept everything about him, because he is my friend.


I wish he believed, I wish he knew, I am his.