Unfriend: A short story

It is the night before my wedding, and I’m scrolling through my phone when I see a friend request from you on Facebook. I accept. There’s a message, too.

“Just wanted to see how you are,” you write casually, as though we’ve been talking all this time, as though our last conversation was yesterday, not four years ago. I am polite, but I do not know who you are. Are you the same person I knew that summer, or are you someone new now?

I tell you I’m getting married, and it catches you by surprise.

“Oh, I didn’t know,” you write. Then, almost as an afterthought, “Congratulations.”

It is here, the message I’ve been waiting for. A “just checking in to see how you are” that would drag my past into my present and jeopardize my future.

I think of the man I knew four years ago, your long hair unkempt and falling over your face, the feel of my fingers moving through it and pushing it away, the sparkly green eyes peeking out from underneath. Does your hair still look the same? I click over to your profile, and it startles me momentarily.

This I’m not expecting to see.

It is a picture from years ago. A photo of the two of us, standing side by side on the edge of a mountain, our hands brushing against one another’s.

I unfriend you on Facebook.

We’re outside, my husband and I, in the alley between the rows of houses. We stand with our backs against the wall, passing the spliff between us wordlessly. The mortgage has come due and we do not have the money to pay it. We haven’t had the money to pay it for many months. Soon, they will take the flat away, maybe even the belongings inside it.

“I will find a new job,” my husband says.

I nod, bring the joint to my lips. The smoke rises from my nose and flies up into the sky.

“You will,” I say. I want to believe this.

A window opens. “Oy!” someone shouts. “There’s no smoking here!”

Instinct kicks in and I immediately pass the joint to my husband, who looks at it, then at me, and bursts out laughing. “Always the goody two shoes,” he says, and I laugh, too. And now we are both laughing, laughing and running, laughing and stopping to catch our breath, laughing as we hunch over in the middle of the alleyway, laughing as I throw my arms around him and kiss him, laughing as he pushes me up against the wall.

I do not think of you then, in that moment.

I think of you later. I think of you all the time.

The past has come back to haunt me. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I wake up in the middle of the night sweating in bed, then fumble downstairs in the dark so I can pass out on the sofa, curl up with the dog, not let the evidence of my pain wake him up again.

I start writing, and writing, and writing.

And there you are in my words. In my memories. Still beating in my heart.

You are nothing to me.

You forfeited that right.

I send you a friend request on Facebook.

I am eighteen, a runaway. You are eighteen, on holiday. My eighteen feels like it’s dragged on a lot longer than yours.

We have both come to this tourist trap for an escape. Only one of us has a return date.

My manager tells me about you before I ever lay eyes on you. “Just your kinda guy,” he drawls. I do not know where I will sleep tonight, if I can get enough tips to put gas in my car, whether I’m here for a day, a week, or a month. You are a distraction I cannot afford. “I’m not interested in men,” I say, and his eyes go wide before they squint close together. “Is that so?” he says, and when I don’t respond, mumbles, “My mistake, I guess.”

You take the table by the window. I have trouble keeping my eyes off you. Those slim shoulders, that tousled hair, the ease with which you talk to the server, have her laughing along with you. My heart jumps when you look at me, just a second too long. My manager elbows me in the chest. "You like, eh? Didn't I say?"

You come in every day at the same time, sit at the same table, order the same drinks. One evening, I turn around and there you are, standing at the bar, looking at me, looking so familiar I wonder if I've known you before. I know the scar under your eye, the one you touch absentmindedly as you look out of the window; I know the way you crack your knuckles before knocking back the last dredges of your drink; I know the smile that appears on that beautiful face as you amuse yourself with something you've thought of, a joke to be savored, not shared. I know your face, that pointy nose, those mesmerising eyes. I have been watching you for days.

You smile, and my own falters.

"I've been watching you for days," you say.

An ex-boyfriend wrote to me, I say to my husband-to-be the night before our wedding. I do not want him to think there is anything I'm hiding, anything to be found out.

But I'm lying, aren't I?

You were never a boyfriend. You were never a date. You were never anything.

A one-night stand, maybe? Is that how you describe that night? A one-night stand that should never have been?

Or were you a friend? A friend who never writes and never stays in touch. A friend I've never once mentioned, even in passing.

Were you someone I loved? Because I loved you, didn't I? Loved you as you cried, loved you as you left, loved you as you turned your back on me. I was heartbroken, wasn’t I? Wanting more of you than you were willing to give.

How do you explain that you loved someone, love someone, even though they were never yours and you never wanted them to be?

How do you explain to your husband-to-be that there is a man out there that you love, but that you're not in love with, that you hold no desire to possess, that you know you will spend the rest of your life loving and never wanting?

I do not know how to explain all this, to myself, let alone to the man who is marrying me, and so I lie. I tell him I heard from an ex-boyfriend.

"Oh, what did he want?" he asks.

"I don't know," I reply. "I unfriended him."

You accept my friend request.

It is as though no time has passed. We are, once again, the lost eighteen-year-olds we were seven years ago. You, with the stable family and the opportunities endless before you. Me, with the uncertainty of jobs and homes and money. I have a husband now, and you have a partner, a girlfriend.

"Still lying to people?" I say, and I know this makes you angry. You do not reply for several days.

When they come, your words are cutting.

"My relationships never last," you say.

"It is your fault," you say.

"You are a hypocrite," you say.

You are being unfair, I know. I cannot take back what happened. I cannot undo the past.

Maybe you’re right about the hypocrisy. Because I do not tell my husband about you, about us. Our relationship is a secret I never wanted to keep. How do I explain to a world that sees things as black and white, as man and woman, as sexual or platonic, that this is none of that? That when I met you, my soul recognized another, that after I loved you, I never looked at anyone the same way again, that I never would be the same person again? That every boyfriend, every potential partner would now be measured against your impossible standard. That once I could see through your eyes, I could only see beauty where once all I had felt was distaste.

I ask you to not mention me to your girlfriend. Keep me quiet, keep me hidden away, I say. Because it is difficult to explain how you can want the best for someone, care for them from afar, be at peace with never seeing them again, and not be accused of being in love with them.

When love becomes an accusation, it can only lead to hate.

Let me be a secret, I say. Because you won't be able to explain it. And if you don't explain it well, she won't understand.

We talk sometimes, you and I. These are brief, insignificant conversations, but eleven years after we first met and seven years after you first got in touch, we're still having them.

A friendship forged over heartbreak is a fog. You go missing for months, years at a time. There one second, gone the next. I don't know when I'll hear from you again. This month, this year. But I always know that I eventually will.

It’s been sixteen months since our last conversation when I message to tell you the adoption is final and we're going to bring our daughter home. You will never know her, she will never know you. But I want you to know about her. You were there when I forged a new identity the last time. I want you to be here for this one as well.

You do not congratulate me.

"You moved on," you say. "You ruined me, and you moved on."

Your words are bitter. Accusatory. Needlessly harsh.

I want to cut you off, take away this power that you have over me, tell you that I no longer want to listen to what you have to say.

Then I remember what you think I did to you, and I compose a reply.

She is quiet the first two nights we bring her home from the hospital, almost too quiet. We worry that she knows, already aware that we aren’t like the others, that we are, almost without question, going to fail her. We pick her up repeatedly, shake toys in her face, schedule hearing tests.

Our fears are allayed on the third day when the screaming starts, continues, and does not stop. We feed her, change her, rock her, bathe her, but nothing seems to work. Nothing, except attaching her to ourselves and walking the length and breadth of the neighborhood. We take turns, my husband and I, trudging through mostly empty streets as neighbors stop us every now and again to ask questions, put their hands on their hearts, tilt their heads, and tell us how happy seeing this child makes them. “You’re going to be such good parents,” one neighbor says to me as I walk away, the same neighbor who spent two years calling me trash and telling me to go live with my own kind.

I’m aware that our daughter’s presence in our life has changed things for us, transformed us from jobless bums to responsible parents. People look at us differently now because we are different.

On the days he’s home, my husband and I walk in shifts. I take her out in the afternoon; he takes the morning and evening. At night, we lie exhausted in bed and look at each other with a strange sense of pride.

Parents. Homeowners. Respectable citizens. We’ve come a long way.

“They’re offering me a promotion,” my husband says.

“Take it,” I reply.

“It would mean more hours,” he says. “More time away from you, and her. How will you manage it all?”

“We could use the money,” I say. “I’ll find a way.”

I have to pinch myself, sometimes, to remind myself that we’ve made it. A stable and growing income. A home. A daughter. Runaway to predictably boring middle-class in less than a decade. The picture of domesticity, lying here in each other’s arms. Who would have thought it?

From the other room, the wailing begins. “Let me,” my husband says, and I watch as he gets off the bed, walks out of the room, and disappears through the door.

“I’ve been watching you.”

I am yours as soon as the words come out of your mouth. I’m flattered that you noticed me, flattered that you kept on looking, flattered that you couldn’t look away. We agree to meet after my shift, and by the time I leave the warmth of the restaurant and enter the darkness of the night, I’m already tipsy. You are standing outside, waiting, the anticipation rife in your face.

"What do you want to do?" you ask.

“Rip those clothes off and ravage you,” is what I want to say. I go with, “I don’t really mind as long as we’re sitting. My feet are killing me.”

We buy vodka and plastic cups from the store and head to the top of the mountain where we sit, our feet dangling over the edge. Down below, the town is lit up like a Christmas card, but around us the sky is dark. There is no one here but us. It is easy to believe, here in this moment, that you and I are the only people on the planet, the last survivors. I smile at the thought.

You’re looking out over the clouds, pensive. I ask how your holiday has been and you say it’s going better now that you’ve met me. You tell me about your family back home. Two sisters, adoring parents, a large house that your nephew runs around in when they come to visit, and where you have a bed waiting for you any time you need. A bedroom with a carpet and comforters and a video game console. Your life is one I have never had, and never will, and I want it all, your life, your bed, the map of the world up on your wall.

You ask about my family, too, and I laugh nervously. “Let’s not ruin the moment,” I say, evasive, but you are persistent. “How can I know you if you don’t tell me who you are?” you insist. And I smile. Because we both know there is no reason for you to get to know me, that you and I move in different worlds. When the world draws a line between us, they put us in different buckets. We are different, you and I, for no other reason that you will go back to a home and a loving family, with a holiday story that you will share with future lovers, a vagabond you met, a runaway you were so fascinated with that you spent much of your vacation in observation. I will be an anecdote to be shared when you want to prove your understanding of the other half.

Maybe I am being unfair. Maybe it is wrong of me to assume that it is only your curiosity that has brought you here, sitting with me on the edge of the world. And is it not curiosity that has brought me to you as well? I’ve been watching you, too, after all, with a morbid fascination. I want to know what someone who has been loved looks like. Someone who has certainty. Someone who knows how to be sure that the next moment isn’t the one that kills them. Who, when faced with misfortune, is surprised, not expectant.

You say something about the starry night, about the romance of being here with me. You take out your digital camera, a gift from your sister, and you ask that I smile as you snap pictures, behind us the vast expanse of sky.

“That first time I saw you in the café,” you say, “I so badly wanted to touch you.” You look straight into my eyes. “I wondered what it would be like to feel your skin on mine.” You take my hand in yours, kiss my fingers gently one by one, then pull me towards you. The empty vodka bottle lies to your side and my hand smashes against it, accidentally pushing it over the edge. We wait for the crash, but it never comes. I roll you over and climb on top of you, the world, our histories, our places in the world all left behind, as I put my mouth on yours and our bodies blend into one.

The wedding happens at the registrar's office, a legality that, after three years of courtship, we have long wished for. My parents don't come; his become mine in proxy. The invitation must have gotten lost, my mother will say later.

After we've signed the papers, we head back to the flat where we're crashing with friends for the week. But as we climb up the steps, I notice our bags, packed and sitting by the door. I wonder if we've been thrown out again. Not entirely an unfamiliar experience, but not one I was expecting on this happy day. I look up and my new husband is smiling. There's an envelope in his hand, which he gives to me. "Your wedding present," he says. There are train tickets in there, and a rent agreement.

"You will never be homeless again," he says. “I will make sure of it.”

I believe him, then. And even though we come close a few times, he never breaks his promise.

I know that this is the man I will spend my life with. That I will always love him. That I will build a life with him.

I make him this promise on the train that day, as we barrel towards our new life.

He believes me too.

I see the news on Facebook. Death by suicide. It is your sister who posts the update.

That night, by the edge of the mountain, our lives changed.

Me, on top. You, below.

Wait, you said. I did not want to wait.

Hold on, you said. I did not want to hold on.

Slow down, you said. I was already inside you. I did not want to slow down.

I kissed you, and you kissed me back. I pulled off my trousers. You whispered you’d never done this before. I promised I’d be gentle. I turned you around and took you from behind, your cries passionately shrill in the silence of the night. I held your head down as I finished.

I woke up to find you sitting in the dark, the lights of the town long ago extinguished. Your face was muddy and tear-stained, your shirt ripped in places. I looked at you, confused. You looked back, angry.

“What happened?” I asked. Admittedly, I did not remember.

“You forced yourself on me,” you said, your voice flat.

I did not remember what happened and so I could not defend myself. The vodka bottle had long ago dropped into the abyss, and so had my memories. I could not match up these two people, the person who did the things you said I did, and the person I knew myself to be.

I am not the person you said I was.

But there you were, sitting in front of me, scared of me, accusing me.

I didn’t know what I did wrong.

Not that it mattered. I am a large, dark-skinned man. You are the boy next door with a double life. Girlfriends, wives, men like me on the side.

You were not ready. I knew I pushed you too far. I regret it every single day.

We stood at the edge of the mountain, looking out. The dark of the night turned to the light of day. I took you to your hotel room. You let me wash your body with soap and warm water, take you to bed, bring you soup.

I needed someone to love. You needed someone to love you. You were easy to love, and I loved you. I loved you the moment I set eyes on you.

I went back to working at the bar. You went back to your bedroom with the comforters and video game console and a map of the world on the wall.

I didn’t hear from you again.

Not until the day before my wedding.

I look again at your sister’s post, announcing your death. The picture is old. You, a shy young man, still discovering who you are, never completely comfortable sharing with the world who I knew you to be.

We were so young. How could we have known who we were?

I did not do what you said.

I wonder who you have told, what you have said. When a man like you makes an accusation against a man like me, there is no trial, only guilt.

They will look through your messages. They will find me. They will come asking questions. Maybe they can recreate the events of that night, piece together a narrative neither of us could agree on.

I was naïve to think my past could stay in the past. It has become my present and soon it will come back to haunt my future, just as I always feared it would.

My hand shakes as I press the button and, for the final time, I unfriend you on Facebook.

.

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