Friends

Friends

I didn’t know that three words can change everything.
Just one short sentence, three tiny little words, eight letters. It took you eight letters and two seconds to turn my world upside down. You said three words and they made me look at you in a completely different way. There was just one sentence leaving your lips but it made me question every single moment we shared.

You had promised me the world and I had been willing to share it with you.
We had stolen your dad’s car to drive down to the border in just one day. It had been summer, remember, and we had decided to sleep outside so we could try to count the stars above. We had been lying on the bonnet of your dad’s posh Cadillac, catching shooting stars in our minds. The chirping of cicadas had been our lullaby and the gentle night breeze our blanket. I can still remember that smell of adventure, the exciting fragrance of broken rules.

We had ditched classes for a whole afternoon to climb our school’s church steeple. There had been so much to see up there, I could have stayed for days. We had watched our classmates wander around the school grounds and they had looked like little ladybugs, hundreds of them. I had felt omniscient, like God, and free, incredibly free and also incredibly alone. But you had been there on my side, squeezing my shoulder and making me strong so I could feel the wind playing with my hair and the cold bricks under my fingers and you, always you. I still remember that sensation of invincibility, the feeling of security and strength you gave me.

We had been hitch-hiking to the ocean and it had taken us a whole week but it hadn’t mattered. All that had been important was finally getting there and feeling the sand scrunching and moving under our toes. Remember how both of us had tried to be the first one in the water? Without even undressing we had jumped over the small waves and bumped into the big ones, causing the water to splash all over our clothes and bodies and we had been laughing so hard. I can still remember that sound of pure happiness, the one thing only you could give me.

And now three words changed all that.

One sentence that has become so natural for us to say to each other, every day, is now changing “us”, or at least “me and you”. Because when I look at your eyes I can tell that “you and I” didn’t change, I can tell that “you and I” has always meant the same thing to you as those eight letters randomly put together (to create the sound of a feeling so hard to understand) do to everybody.

You had promised me the world and I had been willing to share it with you, my friend.

And now three tiny little words have the power to change that.
“I love you.”

I am so sorry, my friend. But that is all you are to me.