“I made myself look away so she wouldn’t feel self-conscious about me staring at her, not that I’d be able to bring myself to meet her eyes in that moment anyway. She was quiet long enough, probably five seconds but it felt like a hollow and agonizing five lifetimes, and I decided I should just end it quickly and easily for both of us. When I finally spoke, it was at the same time she tried to say something. I started to say, “Forget about it, look, I should probably go home,”, just as she started to say “I would, but I kind of made plans with my friends already…”

And I said, “I understand, it’s okay, I should really just go home,” while she said, “Oh, look, you don’t have to go, it’s okay”, and I told her no, I’m really sorry about this, I’ll just go. Because it couldn’t be okay. Because if it was okay, it wouldn’t feel like this, like all of the sudden everything went cold, and there was nothing inside of me, no organs or bones or anything. Like whatever used to be inside me was now just infinitely sinking in on itself.

I practically ran out of her house, and she followed me, telling me she was sorry, and she would go with me but she didn’t want to be rude to her friends, since they didn’t have dates. And maybe that was true, and if I’d stayed long enough to actually talk to her about it, the next few months wouldn’t have been so awful, where we weren’t sure how to talk to one another, because maybe if I had actually engaged with her in that moment, I would have told her how I felt. And maybe there’s the slightest, tiniest, sliver of a chance that if I had communicated honestly with her in that moment, she might have told me how she felt. And maybe she didn’t like me in that way at all, which would have really sucked but at least I’d have fucking known for sure and could have dealt with it. And fuck, maybe, unlikely as it is to be the truth, she might have felt the same, and we might have started to maybe date, which I’d wanted since I met her but obviously isn’t ever going to happen.”