11.30.98.
Open Doors.
He stares into the open refrigerator. Eggs. Cheese. Potato salad. An apple. Celery. Potato salad. Chocolate sauce. Potato salad. He closes the door slowly enough to see the light go out.
He sits down again at the kitchen table, for perhaps the fifth time in as many minutes. He's tried working, but of course he can't keep his mind on studying. He's tried reading for pleasure, but his mind still wandered. He couldn't even keep his thoughts from drifting when he stared into his almost empty mug of tea. He takes off his glasses, and considers eating another chocolate, even though he's already reached his self-imposed limit for the day.
He can't keep still tonight. His thoughts keep drifting back to her. Of course. He contemplates the irony of two mutually inaccessible persons in love with one another as he swallows the last of his now luke-warm tea.
What does he want, he asks himself again. It's like a Zen koan - if I figure out the answer, maybe I'll reach nirvana. I'd certainly be happier. I think.
He doesn't want a long-distance relationship, he knows from experience. Or maybe she's the only person he would want one with... Does he even want a "real" relationship with her at all? What would people think if his former best friend was now his significant other? Hell, fuck people, what would he think? Is that what he really wants? They've been close friends for a long time, could they handle being a couple?
Maybe what she said once might be the best way - of course staying friends, and now being intimate as well, but never making an official commitment. Which would be fine, if she would just break up with her boyfriend...
Why isn't he jealous? No idea. Maybe because he knows the two relationships are so different in her mind that they're almost unrelated. He wonders passively how the boyfriend feels about him.
It's funny, he never imagined himself being part of such a complicated relationship. Up until the middle of freshman year when he suddenly had a girlfriend, he never even pictured himself as someone who would go on dates, and now here he was, one side of a misshapen love-triangle.
And it wouldn't be so awful if he didn't have to be in love with his fucking best friend! Who's idea was that? A friend of his - his first girlfriend, in fact - told him she saw it coming two years away. And his second girlfriend was always suspicious, he thought groundlessly. He only saw it coming after it happened, as always happened in his life. Maybe you're always the last to know the important things in your life. Or maybe it's just him.
When something goes wrong, I'm the first to admit it
The first to admit it, and the last one to know
When something goes right, well it's likely to lose me
It's apt to confuse me, 'cause it's such and unusual sight
I can't get used to something so right
And if only it didn't feel so right when they're together. When they stay up talking long past either of their bedtimes; when they lie next to each other in bed; when they come so close to kissing a hundred times in a night. Something so right. She makes him so happy. So why is he so sad?
He yawns and lays his head on the Formica table-top. The noise of the fan above the stove bothers him intensely. Maybe he'll fall asleep soon. Maybe he'll remember his dreams about her tomorrow morning.