She’s angry and is trying to wriggle out of my grasp, but I will not allow it. We stop a hundred meters down the road from the pub while she continues to protest.
“You can’t do this,” I tell her in a serious tone. “You cannot,” I repeat, letting her go so I can massage my temples. My head is about to explode. “Why him?”
She sighs and sits on the sidewalk, defeated. I sit down next to her.
“Because he doesn’t know anything about me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If he doesn’t know anything about me, maybe he would just treat me like any other girl he wants to get with and not turn a potential relationship into a humanitarian cause, and then I could finally know what it’s like to feel…” She stops, blushes and breaks eye contact with me.
“What? What is it that you need to feel?”
Then I stop to reflect for a few seconds and the rage comes back, taking control of me. I jump to my feet and scream at her.
“Are we talking about…are you talking about sex, Alex? Is that what you’re looking for?”
She stands up too, keeping a certain distance between us. I see her shaking and I’m not sure that she’s cold. She seems to become even paler in front of my eyes and I realize that I’ve been too aggressive, but the truth is I don’t know how to behave myself with her.
“Oh come on, Jason. It’s just sex, okay?”
“That’s what you want? Casual sex?”
How in God’s name we ended up talking about sex I do not know. I can’t talk to her about these things and I can’t think of her in that way.
I’ll never be able to have her.
Never.
“For you it’s just sex, Jason,” she starts to explain, as she tries to hide her embarrassment about this improbable conversation which is particularly destructive.
For me, obviously.
Because, seriously, I’m the one who could die at the thought of Alex in someone else’s arms.
“For me, it means feelings. Feeling my body. Feeling someone else’s body…Feeling something, feeling like I’m still here.”
And I fall down on the sidewalk: her words have knocked me out, punched me in the face and almost made me lose consciousness.
I cannot even imagine what she’s feeling, what a life like hers must be like. I have lived mine in a completely different way and I’m certainly not proud of it.
How do you respond to a confession like that? What should I tell my ex-best friend? How should I console her?
I take my head in my hands and breathe in deeply, squeezing my eyes tightly to force away the image I now have in front of me: that of Alex with another man.
Of Alex kissing another man. Of Alex in bed with another man. Of Alex in another man’s life.
An Alex without me.
These are thoughts that bring about a slow death. It’s like I’m frozen in place watching a blade skim over my heart back and forth, back and forth, each time cutting a bit deeper until it finally remains wedged in there, letting me bleed to death in an infinite, unbearable death.
Because Alex will love someone someday and I know I can’t avoid that, I can’t control it and I have no voice in the matter.
Because Alex is not mine.
And I can only blame myself for it.
“I should have…” I whisper, resigned to it, talking more to myself than to her.
