Are you serious?

Back to being friends sounds reasonable when you say it abstractly... but it's the stupidest, corniest, most insensitive thing ever.

Two people still care about each other. So they set boundaries, shake hands, and go back to being friends.

Except your body says no, and you can't quite believe it because, at that exact moment, and for the rest to follow for a pretty long time, the memories just come back stronger and even more velvety than they occurred.

“Are you serious?”, a sentence ripped straight up from the soul.

It's damn near impossible to believe they didn't feel it too.

It was just me? Really??

Because if that were true, it'd be the scariest, most horrible feeling ever. It'd mean that there were no witnesses to the world you thought you shared together.

Reality doesn't exist in only one mind, and you've just been told, “That didn't happen, and that world doesn't exist,” by the only other person you thought shared that world with you.

So, like... how do you casually become friends with someone you've already learned in an entirely different language?

Someone whose hands in yours mean something. Whose attention you kinda crave. Whose approval can make you feel ten feet tall and invincible, or suddenly inadequate. Someone you've probably had to lose repeatedly while they were still standing physically in front of you.

All the while wondering, doubting actually, if a significant chunk of your memories were false or if they ever existed.

That is psychosis.

It would be better if that world and the person ceased to exist in unison.

Rather than a migration to a whole new world with different rules, and the idea that the other world never existed.

It's a very strange thing, I think, because it's just two people who can make each other incredibly happy sometimes, and incredibly miserable at others.

And maybe that's all there is to it.

Maybe you meet them, learn them, love them, lose them, and then spend the rest of your life knowing exactly what it felt like to have exactly them.

This is pathetic and stupid. It's corny and cringy. It's juvenile, and you should hate it, not wallow in it.

Maybe you should just hate them, take the fuel, and go do something ambitious for you with it.

Unfortunately... hate is just the same side of the same coin.

So just turn it off.

How do you turn it off?

Maybe in another life.

Addendum

This one's intentionally abrasive. I think the anger, or is it hate?, gives the gooey meaning... something to push against.

Otherwise it becomes another bucket of sentimental sludge that, without meaning, lets the moments eventually fade away.

Maybe that's a roundabout way to admit you're trying to preserve the moments by giving them meaning... doesn't matter what it means, so long as it means something. Just so it doesn't fade away. Admit it meant that much.

So you see? You love, you hang on; you hate, you hang on.

It takes me at least three days to go from ideation to words with these specific kinds of literary expression. This one took less than a day.

I'm not sure why.

Or why I'm saying this, in fact.

It just seemed like an appropriate addendum.

So there you have it.

There we were.