One Shots 3.0 [boyxboy]

XY

6/11/12

Dear Xavi,

                I am in love with you.

                I feel like that’s important to get out of the way in the beginning, because otherwise I would feel silly writing to you like this, and also because I will never, ever let you read it. I think you might already know, though. I don’t do a very good job of hiding it. Trent says everybody knows – Beth, Catherina, Simon, Rob, even Ian. So maybe you do too.

                I make those stupid little jokes about how we’ll end up together some day and have that poor, prematurely abused little child called Nijlpaard, and you just sort of smile and nod and not really play along. So that’s how I know you don’t really feel the same way.

                Trent told me that one night when we were all at yours and Simon’s, he asked you if you had feelings for me and you said you didn’t know what he was talking about. Sometimes I let my wishful thinking take over and play up little things like when you hug me and look at me too long or ask to hang out, just the two of us.

                You don’t really do that anymore.

                I think that even if you don’t know, you realise on some level, and you’ve started avoiding me. I think you prefer hanging out in groups, and I think you prefer Beth and Trent to me... Ian says that’s not true, that I’m one of your best friends, but I’m not really, am I? We really only started hanging out properly when I visited you in New York and then you moved back here, and that was literally the same time you started seeing Aimee. Possibly the only reason we spend so much time together is because we have her in common.

                I spend a lot of time thinking about you. I think about holding your hand and hugging you and kissing you, and I think about sitting around on weekends listening to you talk about cars, and explaining things I don’t understand, and making jokes you don’t realise are funny until I stop breathing because I’m laughing so hard. I think I made a really big mistake when I went to New York.

                But maybe not. Because we have a history of getting drunk and almost hooking up and then I don’t hear from you for a few months and it hurts every time. Maybe if I’d known how things would go, that you’d move back to Connecticut and start going to my school and just that our circumstances would be different, I would have done something different too. But I didn’t.

                I feel like I miss you all the time. Sometimes I miss you even when I’m with you. I act pretty pathetic around you these days. Yesterday we were all sitting in school and I realised towards the end that my whole body was angled towards you, that I was leaning forward towards you, even the way I had my legs, they were practically on top of you. When I go too long without seeing you I get withdrawal. Every time you don’t text me back I assume I’ve done something wrong. That’s not really healthy, is it?

                I think even if you did feel about me the way I feel about you, I don’t think we’d work as a couple. We’d fuck up a relationship through combined narcissism and selfishness and just the fact that we’re both so fundamentally fucked up. We’re too damaged. So sometimes I think, maybe in the future. Maybe when we’re both single and a little more stable and ready, we could try for real. But that probably won’t happen either, because this isn’t a book or a movie, this is real life and people move on and feelings change and new people come into our lives and we forget.

                Which is a truth that leaves me feeling conflicted. The way I feel about you now, part of me wants it to stop so badly because thinking about you the way I do, and knowing you think about somebody else that way, hurts. But trying to imagine not feeling this way leaves me empty. And I don’t want that either.