Dancing on My Own

Freshman year, when we were about 18 and 19 respectively, Nate and I had "a talk".  We were in the UC Dining Hall for lunch, just the two of us.  A regularity.  It was probably between classes, or we wouldn't have been all the way over there.  One of us, probably me, was eating a bright green apple.  I don't remember if I had planned this conversation, if I had talked to my friends about how "I just need to say something to him", or if I just blurted it out.  It felt blurted out.

"Look, this-- us-- just isn't gonna happen."
He gives me this look somewhere between, "What isn't gonna happen?" and "DUH."
Pregnant pause.
"Mmkay," he finally manages and continues eating.
He's looking at me expectantly, waiting for the conversation to go in a different direction.  He's trying to act as if I said something as innocuous and impersonal as, "Look, finishing this paper tonight, just isn't gonna happen."
"I mean, like, we're never gonna date or anything... you get that, right?"
He gives up on feigning ignorance.
"Well, yeah," he says, "but I can't stop the way I feel about you."

I think about that moment a lot recently.  "But I can't stop the way I feel about you."  It's hard to articulate why that's on my mind all the time.  Though I bet you can guess.  I also think about the fact that we dealt with that realization, accepted and moved on from that, and 7 years later we have a successful, functional friendship devoid of that kind of underlying tension.

Ironically, it was Nate who said to me the other day, "Biddy, just let it go."
"Don't you think I would if I could?"