Charlotte Diehl, A Place to Lie | L*STS

  

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A Place to Lie

Charlotte Diehl

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You really should have seen this coming. 

Maybe some part of you did, but didn't want to. We'd have that in common, I suppose. I almost did when I cut you off once before, told you I needed some space after what you said. Space to process. Space to internalize. Space to fill. I couldn't stay away forever, though. My friends were your friends, and we were making things awkward. I wanted to be considerate, and, well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Easier to just close my eyes and get on with it.

I tried to expand the distance this time: unfriending you here, deleting your messages there, telling you I couldn't make any promises. Anything but actually saying it outright. I wonder if a part of me had hoped you wouldn't notice, would just have kept acting like nothing had changed, like nothing needed to change. Because maybe, it hadn't, it didn't. Maybe, I was just overreacting. After all, I'd always been such a pessimist. According to you. 

Someone reading this might think we were lovers. We weren't, though I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind. Invasive, unwanted, stepping over my boundaries for no other reason than that it could. I remember the time we went to the Fourth Avenue Street Fair: we were giving each other shit in and a vendor, smiling, told us we made a cute couple. It was the first time since transitioning that anyone had called me cute.

Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe the memory, in its desire to be significant, was willing to kill off its competitors. Perhaps the memory had the survival instinct I never did, until it was almost too late. Dramatic much? Maybe. I certainly got off light, all things considered. You never raised a hand to me, saving that sort of abuse for your partners. You say you can't remember, but they do. Maybe your memories don't have the survival instinct they did when they left.

Perhaps the reader thinks us siblings, then; you could be the brother I never had. Nevermind the one I did, the gulf of age between us too large for us to cross, or large enough not to bother. Proverbial then? Brothers—then later siblings—in arms? We certainly went through the trenches in high school, taking verbal bullets for each other many times. If only I'd noticed how many of those were friendly fire. I'm sure you were aiming for someone else, most of the time. These things happen in war.

Then the reader must conclude we were just friends. Yes, of course, that must be it. Friends always tell the truth and, whenever we argued, which was often, you'd helpfully remind me that I'm a terrible person. Repitition. Reinforcment. Realization that it must be true, because it explained why I was always the one who had to apologize. I could live with being terrible, though, because at the end of the day, week, month, we always made up.

Except that's not entirely true, is it? I made up:

• Apologies, to those who got caught in the middle.
• Contrivances, that made it seem like you had a plan.
• Excuses, that made the scars easier to conceal.
• Motivations, that made you the hero of this story.
• Rationalizations, for what on Earth you could have possibly been thinking.

You made up: 

• Your mind, like a bed, made it comfortable so you'd always have a comfortable place to lie. 

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I wrote this piece shortly after making the difficult decision to cut ties with one of my oldest—as I thought of him then—friends. Though we shared some good times growing up, I didn't recognize his emotional abuse and manipulation for what it was until long after I should have. Though it's the first creative nonfiction piece I've written in some time, I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Charlotte Diehl is an aspiring writer currently living in Maine. Her work, if she ever gets around to it, will explore the topics of queerness, identity, and acceptance, among other things. She is currently psyching herself up to write her (hopefully) first (and hopefully not last) novel.