A Good Friend

“…except for my sister.” Her exact words.

I was her ‘best pal.’ Her words too.

That summed it up perfectly.

The friend-zone is where I made my residence. No sight of anything other than being the person she told everything to and came to when she needed someone. Nothing for miles around, even the sky had been taken away.

She was beautiful. Gorgeous blue eyes, soft brunette hair, a laugh and smile that were sweet enough to make me ill. A perfect a*s, lovely breasts, and a slender curvy body supporting it all. She had everything a man could want and all I was, was her

‘best pal.’

Such a reliable and trustworthy person I was to her that when I finally grew the balls to ask her out, she hesitated.

For four months.

When you tell yourself it will never work out though and this conversation pertains to you and your ‘best pal,’ how much do you really care about that person? To drag them along, leaving them bits of hope along the way like Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs to find their way home, all the while telling yourself it will not work. All of this before he is even given a chance to prove you wrong.

I gave up. Four months later I told her the truth about how the constant game of back and forth was only confusing me and was stressing enough to fuel a new wave of depression. I’ve learned in this time that health insurance is a must have, especially when you have a condition. Needing medication when even your best is nowhere near enough to keep you going and simply talking to someone one a weekly basis is helpful for at least four hours. Sometimes not even though four hours last when you over analyze it all faster than normal.

We wouldn’t date and I had to accept that. So I said it first.

“I really did want to date you.” She says to me after her first words to me in over two weeks were,

“We will never date.”

I’ve quit the job after three and a half years. When we worked together she acted as if nothing had happened, upholding her image of herself to everyone. She doesn’t want them, and everyone else for that matter, to see that she is holding up a wall to them. Never letting them know what was going on in her life.

She looked out for me when I needed someone, when I couldn’t turn to my friends because I couldn’t allow them to see me without my walls. That was almost a year ago now and obviously things have changed. No more than a month after those words of her’s she is seeing someone and for the first time, people know about it.

Somehow though I have become the villain of this season because I did something for myself. And even though the show continues to carry on it lost one of its longest running and most popular characters. The end of the episode was how I wanted it.

I was alone as I pushed those gray metal doors open for one last time. I walk to the curb and put on my sunglasses. My friend pulls up next to me and I get into the car. He asks me how my day was and I smile. I look to him as he takes a turn.

“It would have been perfect if Ziggy Stardust had been playing for the last three minutes.”

Reviews

[Lloyd Lofthouse]

I've been there--in love with a friend of the opposite sex that didn't see me as someone to love. That sucks. It also leaves scares. Why? Shouldn't friends make the best lovers since they care for more than just the sweet a*s and long legs--they love the person inside the skin too. Flash fiction--not a poem.