Him (quietly, ruefully): I like you.

Me (shocked):  What?

Him: I love you.

Me (still shocked but on the verge of tears, now): No you don’t.

I guess it’s heartening to know that dream!me is truly a wonderful reflection of myself.

Yesterday I was pretty woozy for most of it. Couldn’t compute basic math, could barely keep up with conversations mentally or verbally, and by the time I went to bed I was falling over into things like doorjambs and the stove. So I decided I was going to sleep today until I just couldn’t sleep no more and hope that helped set everything right.

I had plenty of dreams. I don’t remember most of them but this last one, which came on sometime after noon, was like being punched to the mouth.

The fare was standard at first. I was on a roadtrip somewhere going to some stranger’s wedding thing? I’m not sure. At some point there was waterskiing with the modern-day, boat-bound, nudist version of the Dothraki which must’ve been when I separated from my parents and ended up in California alone, just me and some round-cheeked, adorable girl I was supposed to know. Probably from the internet.

Anyway, after the waterskiing we made our way ashore which was when I noticed Him. I think I’d seen him before but he was there, standing below us and wandering amidst the other partygoers. I lost sight of him, probably on purpose, and the dream continued. Stuff happened that wasn’t particularly important, like me being introduced to lots of women in over-fluffed dresses and it turning out that this was the wedding of a Khardashian (must’ve been some alternate universe where they were modern-day gypsies or something, though).

He found me again, outside the building were the festivities were supposed to be taking place. I was with my Mystery Friend when he approached and we both stood awkwardly, everything that had happened between us filling all that space and making me uncomfortably aware that this wasn’t going to end well. We talked before he closed the gap between us, I think. He said something about facebook statuses of all things, how I post cryptic ones. I said it was only the one time. It was a pretty ridiculous conversation except for the tension between us, like the tenuous balance we’d always kept despite our fights and the years of not even speaking, were going to tip and force action instead of us continuing to run away from each other and do nothing.

When he finally moved in close, I leaned against him and wrapped my arms around him like I’ve missed doing. I hid my face in the fabric of his (bright, lurid) red shirt and clung because I was afraid of the moment when I’d have to let go. He hugged me back, arms as strong as I remember, body warm and solid against mine. And then he pulled back just a little, enough so I could hear him say it: I like you.

What?

I love you.

No you don’t.

And he laughed and said he did and everything is a blur of me crying and trying to talk him out of it and him insisting it was true and he was sorry for screwing up and he’d missed me. There was this knot in my stomach, heavy with the yin-yang feelings of joy and despair. Despair because I didn’t want to believe and be hurt again, joy because this was everything I’d always wanted.

I don’t care, I said before I wrapped my arms around his neck and tugged his face down to mine. I don’t care.

He would hurt me again. He would ruin me. And all I could do was smile until my cheeks hurt and kiss him. His stubble scraped my skin and I felt the press of our lips down to my toes and I was happy.

I woke up sometime after that, pissed off and hurt and unsettled. All of that because he liked a status, I guess. How silly can a woman get?

It’s funny because having such vivid dreams where all my senses are at play is usually awesome and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to wake up and no longer have that body in my arms, his smile pressed to mine. It just makes the jarring return to the real world worse.

All I know is, right now hate everything except this bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and this cherry-pomegranate drink I made. Screw it all, seriously.

Besides, who wants to hear about how I struggle to get out of bed because I hate my body and I’m terrified I’m going to die alone? I don’t even want to hear about it, and I can’t stop thinking about it 99% of the time.

But I’ve been dragging my broken heart behind me like the tattered latex strands of a busted balloon and I thought maybe I could come up with some interesting way of broaching the subject. I’ve got nothing, actually. Just enough tales of woe and unrequited love to give Pete Wentz all the feels. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

I can tell you this: falling for someone and then befriending them? Mistake #1.

It’s not about landing in the Friend Zone, although that certainly sucks. It’s more that when you fall ass-over-tits in lust with someone and then you become buddies, sometimes the thing you felt first doesn’t go away. That person isn’t suddenly hideous. Their smile is no less sweetly crooked. Their hands don’t go from wide and strong to spindly and awkward. They don’t develop the smell of sulfur and dead dreams, their voices don’t grind and grate to Steve Urkle proportions. If they were tall they don’t shrink to the height of an Oompa-Loompa. If they weren’t tall, they don’t sprout a hunched back and a few visible hairy moles.

You will get no assistance from God or nature if you’re hoping that whatever you lusted after will just up and disappear. It won’t. If you’re lucky, maybe the more time you spend with that person will lead to the death of whatever chemistry you hoped you might have. You’ll realize that person is the best friend you could’ve hoped for, you will laugh at your earlier licentious leanings, and all will be well. This is, of course, presuming you aren’t also me and therefore have some kind of rapport with the universe that doesn’t always end with a cosmic, “LOL but seriously, eff you.”

Trust me when I say that I didn’t think I’d be here, four years after the fact, regretting the day that a particularly attractive boy asked me to be his partner in an acting class and proceeded to carve out tiny chunks of that amorphous bundle of raw nerves and pure love that we call a heart over the course of three years. I thought, “He’s really hot. We don’t have anyone this good looking in the English department.” I had no way of knowing how brutally and impolitely boned I’d be for laying eyes on him.

We built a relationship after that first day we really interacted. He sought me out, talked to me, flirted with me (or so I assume, I have a difficult time accepting this even though I’m pretty sure it’s true). I’m not the kind of girl who gets that kind of attention very often from guys who aren’t also A) not all that attractive to me B) extremely creepy C) playing nice for the fifteen minutes it takes them to work up the nerve to seek an invitation into my pants or D) all of the above. I didn’t know what to do with myself and maybe that’s why the lust turned to such a fast and hard crush. Part of that was all on him, though. He was charming and a little odd but also really cool in this way I can’t describe. It was like he was a former douchebag trying really hard to be nice trying really hard to be a douchebag. I guess in a movie he’d be that jerk with a heart of gold type and you know what? They are just as easy to fall for as Hollywood says, damn them.

I wanted him so bad. I’d never been kissed, never been wanted back, never had these feelings that felt like maybe they weren’t going to go to waste on someone who couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about me or what my heart was doing. But the timing just wasn’t right. I was scared and thought maybe I should get to know him better and the next thing I knew, we were friends.

It wasn’t perfect. Remember the part where he was a jerk with a heart of gold? Yeah, those guys are also way bigger dicks than Hollywood says. He acted accordingly a couple of times and after that my crush cooled off and I realized I didn’t want to be with someone like that. But the problem was, we didn’t stop talking or hanging out. We went from being kind of casual friends to kinda close friends. I don’t know that we ever got the point of spilling secrets or anything. Like I said, only a handful of people get access to that. But we had a relationship that was unique to us, at least on my end. I’d never had something like it before, haven’t had anything like it since, and I blame that for ruining everything.

Because if we hadn’t been that close then maybe I’d have just gotten over him. I’d go for months being past it, focusing on someone else or something else. We’d talk on the phone, see each other on campus, little things that were just friendly. And then out of nowhere I’d remember I liked him. Like when he started going out with this girl we knew and I felt the news like a solid punch to my stomach and no matter how much I tried not to be, no matter how many times I told myself I was over it, I was still jealous. Honestly, falling in love with him was like trying to undo the knot in the chain of a necklace. I could tug and pull and give myself enough slack to think I was almost there, but following the loop would just tighten the thing back up again and leave me right where I was when I started.

Eventually I realized the clasp was hooked in the back all along, but there was no way to just unhook it and get rid of the knot in a few simple steps. It was ruined. I was gone. I didn’t even realize how bad it was then. Things were rough between us for a while. He got weird and cruel and I responded by being confused and hurt and angry, not even with him as much as I was pissed at myself for being every cliche and stereotype in the TV Tropes database. We talked less and less, saw each other maybe twice after this huge fight we had that left me in tears and both of us just scrambling for I don’t even know what. That night was a mess; we got into it in front of other friends, he crossed a line, and trying to fix it that night between phone calls and texts just . . . didn’t work. He told me he loved me and I believed him, I forgave him, but we were never the same after that. The same thing happened again a few days later, everything got worse and worse, and then he decided to leave.

Telling him how I felt was purely selfish, but the truth is that any time you put yourself out there like that it’s a selfish action. I feel like I should keep my feelings to myself a lot of the time because the only reason I’m saying anything is for my own benefit. I will honestly avoid telling someone I like them because I’m afraid it’ll burden them. And welcome to the point in the blog where we all acknowledge just how much this chick needs therapy (hint: so much). But it’d be narcissistic to think that when you confess your feelings to someone, you’re doing it so he or she will get something out of the experience. It’s for closure or it’s for a chance at something you want. Maybe they want it too, but you’ll never known if you don’t take that step.

I never got to that point with it. I had a feeling he didn’t want me but he was going away and I couldn’t let him leave without just putting out there that, hey, I like you. I needed him to know.

I thought things would be okay after that. He responded well. I mean, he didn’t confess his undying love but he was sweet in letting me down. He told me because he was moving he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend and other things I wanted to believe because he was an ass sometimes, sure, but he wasn’t prone to lying to me. Even in my confession he got on me about lying before when I let slip that I used to like him and implied I didn’t like him anymore. At the time, I was trying to believe that. He was just upset I never told him the truth.

Of course, after that he got a girlfriend. Then he moved away without saying goodbye.

I went through the whole grieving process, I think, but I feel like I’m lost somewhere between acceptance and I don’t know what. Because I know that he’s gone, but in resigning myself to that I realized the reason it hurts so bad is because I think I was in love with him. I still am, in a lot of ways. And not just the way I say I’m in love with Jensen Ackles, either. I’m in love with Jensen Ackles’ face, okay. His hands, his voice, his mouth, holy Mary mother of God, his mouth. But that’s lust. The way I felt for this guy, still feel for him, is so different. It’s . . . it’s like it’s own physical presence. It’s an actual entity, not some hormonal reaction or fleeting obsession. And it’s just going to rot away until it’s a sad, wilted stump of a thing that never got the chance to grow strong because it was raised on desert dust and nurtured by a drought.

So either I have no idea what love is and this is something else entirely, or I’m still in love and it sucks. It sucks like that giant, sand-worm monster with the teeth from Star Wars. That bad.

This has been on my mind a lot because my heart was recently trampled on by someone else. I’ve been thinking about feelings and how easily they can go to waste. I’ve thought about what a ridiculous excuse being afraid is when the truth is being told no can’t hurt worse than the not knowing. I’ve thought about mistakes I’ve made and haven’t made, how much I hate that I constantly blame myself for this, how I always try so hard to be positive but I’m not-so-secretly convinced there’s just something wrong with me and I really am going to evolve into one of those spinster cat ladies. This would be fine except I’ve always wanted nothing more than to love someone and be loved back. Some girls grow up dreaming of their weddings or their Prince Charmings or their babies, their careers. I grew up dreaming of writing novels and being in love with someone who’s in love with me.

Last night I specifically dreamed of that guy. It was the second time in the last few months it’s happened. The first time I dreamed we were cuddling in an armchair which was pretty random, but I think I needed the comfort. Last night we were driving up to the mountains with a couple friends. We’d reconnected somehow and things were awkward, still. I was worried he’d leave again, he was . . . different. But we talked like we were friends. He listened and he smiled at me and I woke up missing him.

That’s the thing about falling in love with a friend: when they leave, you don’t really mourn what could’ve been as much as you mourn what was. Maybe we could’ve had a relationship and maybe it would’ve been amazing. I’d be lying if I said his isn’t the face that pops into my head every time Adele sings her heart and lungs out about what could’ve been.

But I just want my friend back. I miss him. I wonder, sometimes, if hindsight’s made our relationship into something it wasn’t. And then I think of all the little things he said, the moments we had that I’ll write about someday, give to characters who’ll put them to use. I consider the fact that I defended him when no one else would because I saw things I don’t think anyone else did. It could’ve been in my head or the result of naivete, but I like to think he let me into places no one else got to see. The kinds of places he made me promise not to tell others about because they didn’t jive with his persona.

Whatever the case, whether I’m delusional and pathetic or I just love too damn hard and with too much of me, it doesn’t change anything. I just get to keep waiting for the day I don’t ache when I think about him. I get to hope that someone else comes along and gives me what he gave me and more.

Basically, I get to cross my fingers for the happy ending to one of Adele’s angst-ridden albums. But I suppose if it comes down to it, I’ll just fall back on my cat lady plan.