collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative

"Grace, you won't believe it." 

 

My friend Matt and his new roommate Charlie barged into my room and made themselves comfortable on my bed. Matt launched into a story about kissing my roommate after the party I had just dipped away from. Charlie curled up next to me and fell asleep clutching my arm while Matt filled me in on all the gossip. I scolded the two of them for waking me up. After a few of my yawns Matt declared they were headed home and tried to wake Charlie up as he burrowed further into me, holding on for dear life.

 

I complained, and poked Charlie to go, but when he eventually got up I missed his warmth. I liked to push the boys away just to see that they wanted to stay. Our friendship was new, barely three months old, and already I was hooked on the comfort with which we moved around each other.

 

I had always kept various tight-knit groups of female friends, each sewn together with tears, life stories, emotional talks into the night, and check-in texts. This was a new type of friendship: Matt, Charlie, Willie, Michelle, and me. We ate lunch every day at the fountain and declared we would all quit at the same time. We didn’t divulge our secrets; we shot the shit. We interweaved our lives with shared experiences, not shared trauma.

 

We went to Matt's house and sledded down an abandoned ski mountain, bowling at the local dive and buying too many scratchies before falling asleep in front of the fire. I dreamt we played hide and seek around Boston and Charlie said, “first rule: there should be drinking involved.” Three weeks later the game ended with Willie in full cowboy getup llasso-ing a stranger then running into a traffic pole. We kidnapped Willie and booked it to Montreal for the weekend. We looked like a confused bachelor party in matching hats I had made for the trip- embroidered with “botched,” Charlie’s favorite saying. 

 

Strangers approached us in the park asking to join our drinking circle, and we said yes. Michelle carried a deck of cards everywhere. Charlie raised the question of how many park pigeons would make it back to land if dropped in the middle of the Atlantic. We debated that topic, passionately, no less than 15 times.

 

One week while discussing what our plans were for the upcoming weekend, Willie had an idea.

 

"Charlie, how much would I have to pay you to tattoo my initials on your butt?"

"Nothing, as long as you're paying for it."

 

Three shots and a tattoo later Charlie leaned over and whispered to me, "I wish these were your initials on my butt."

 

"Not Matt’s? But he's your best friend."

"Matt's not my best friend, Grace, you are."

 

I smiled and hugged him. I basked in the knowledge that he loved me so much, but I knew that I couldn't say it back. Our friendship wasn’t “you got this” texts, digging through our childhood experiences, or talking through how to deal with a misogynistic coworker. That role was reserved for Michelle. I confided in Michelle; we took care of each other. Charlie and I were drinking buddies and instigators of bad ideas. He was a guy friend, not a best friend. 

 

Once Charlie had projected that intimacy onto me, I found it hard to shake.

 

That winter I began seeing someone, and the guy would give me shit for my ever-increasing drunk heart to hearts with Charlie. This guy would find us huddled together whispering behind speakers in bars, diving into our emotions. Sometimes Charlie and I remembered what we had admitted the next day, sometimes we didn’t. I would beg Charlie to tag along to awkward events with this guy and his friends, taking shots with Charlie to ignore the fact that I was being ignored.

 

Charlie would whisper in my ear, “I bet people think we’re the ones dating,” and I would burst out laughing.

 

When the guy slept with someone else then promptly moved to Berlin and cut off contact with me, Charlie left work to sit with me while I teared up. I kept apologizing for my emotions. 

 

“I really don’t think you talking to him is a good thing because you’re beyond amazing and every second you give him takes away from the amazingness you not only deserve but will inevitably receive.”

 

My friends came up to New Hampshire to visit my parents that summer. Charlie spent the day at my Dad’s side smoking ribs, ganging up on my mom when she insisted there wasn’t space in the smoker to cook some chicken drummies. In the morning he helped my mom make coffee, and in the afternoon he helped my dad put in the dock. We loaded up a cooler of beers and played king of the castle on the neighbors’ raft until they yelled about private property. We watched sparklers like chain smokers, using the ember of a finished sparkler to light the next. We jumped into the lake to stare at the stars.

 

The next week I sat next to my mom on a flight to visit my grandma. She could not stop talking about my new friends. 

 

“You’ve always had good friends, Grace, obviously, but these friends, they’re special.” 

I agreed. 

“Especially Charlie. He’s got something to him. And he’s so cute! Dad and I were wondering if you’d ever date.”

 

Charlie had a way of making you feel like you had met him in the middle of your friendship. He had charmed my mom in the same way I watched him charm everyone he met. I wanted to show him off to everyone I knew. I loved to watch others love him. The best part was that I was his favorite. I felt like my mother would never understand this bond outside the boundaries of dating. Our relationship was pure, untainted by the complications sex carries with it. We didn’t need romance to feel close.

 

The summer carried on, filled with drinking on Michelle’s roof and being outside as much as possible before the cold came in. Michelle and I got tired of having to lyft home after our late night conversations, and decided we should move in together. Michelle and Charlie hooked up while blacked out one night. I wondered if I was about to lose my two best friends to each other. Both of them said it was a silly mistake, so we all carried on. From then on Michelle and Charlie’s “romance” became a running joke. When Charlie got into business school in North Carolina we taunted Michelle about whether she could handle the humid climate when she moved in with her CEO husband.

 

Charlie got a summer job as a deck-hand and mentioned one perk was free campsites on an island in the Boston harbour. We paid a local fisherman to take us out one evening. Immediately upon arrival Charlie convinced a park ranger to let us hang off his golf cart to ferry us to the west side of the island just in time for sunset. After dark we explored the abandoned mental asylum and wandered past bonfires on the shore collecting tiny crabs. Michelle claimed her brother used to eat them.

 

“I’ll eat one if you do,” I dared.

“You’re on.”

 

The crunch of the crab was quickly followed by Charlie’s gags.

 

A drunk Matt wandered up to me, “Grace, things are so boring when you and Charlie aren’t together. When you guys aren’t at lunch, we basically sit in silence.”

 

I punched him in the arm, but I knew the way Charlie and I lit up a room. When we talked it felt like others held their breath. 

 

In September we all went down to North Carolina to stay in a big house on the ocean and drink spiked seltzer. One night Charlie got too drunk; as I put him to bed, he turned to me and said, “Why haven’t we ever hooked up?”

 

I was furious he would demean our friendship in that way. I had told Charlie about my biggest insecurities; he had offered to come to my Dad’s radiation appointments with me. He was drunk, too drunk to reason with. I dismissed the validity of the question, “Charlie we aren’t like that. We mean more to each other than sex; we can get married, but we will never hook up.”

 

I assumed he was too drunk to remember; he didn’t bring it up again.

 

Later that week Charlie and I had a 12 hour drive back to Boston alone to ourselves. Neither of us thought twice about the silence we needed to fill; conversation spilled out of us. We stopped off at his grandmother’s house to visit his childhood friend. Charlie said I’d hate him, but I wanted to love everyone he loved.

 

After a few hours of drinking, Charlie’s friend asked us the question we’d come to expect: “Why aren’t you two dating?”

 

We threw out the usual excuses. 

 

He proposed a new question: “How would you feel if the other started dating someone else?”

 

Jealous, of course. I craved the glow of Charlie’s favor; I liked knowing my place in his rankings of people, but only because I was at the top.

 

Later he crawled into bed with me, like we’d done before. Suddenly we were kissing, urgently. His hands all over me. Our intimacy blurred from emotional to physical; it felt natural. I pulled away.

 

“Charlie?”

“Yeah?”

“Charlie, we shouldn’t do this. We can get married, we can be together, but we shouldn’t do this.”

 

We went back and forth. He thought it was nothing. I explained that if it was nothing, then it shouldn’t happen. If we wanted to be physical, we had to do it right; we had to have a relationship. I didn’t want to be lumped in with every other woman he’d slept with. I didn’t want to exchange something precious for something cheap.

 

“I can’t lose you, Charlie. I just can’t.”

 

I started to choke up. He pulled me closer. “You won’t. I’m sorry, you won’t.”

 

We stayed like that, my head on his chest, until I fell asleep. 

 

We told no one. Not even Michelle. At first I thought it was a drunken mistake, but then I thought about the warmth of his attention, my need to be close to him. Everyone else felt dull in comparison.

 

Over the next four weeks we fell further into each other. I refused to tell people about our relationship until I had clarity on where we stood, yet with each passing interaction our relationship got murkier. We discussed our kiss, neither of us knowing how we felt about it, but both of us knowing how important we felt the other person was to us. We talked about moving to London together. We weren’t sure if we wanted to be together, but we never wanted to be apart. Charlie repeated over and over that if a girlfriend got between us he would break up with her.

 

“Charlie, I feel like you don’t tell anyone what you’re thinking.”

“That’s insane, because I tell you more than anyone else. You’re the most important person in my life.”

 

One night we slept together — an act somewhere between lust and the need to know the other person completely.

 

We talked again, and decided we would rather be friends than lose each other. Two days later we fooled around again. The day after that, Charlie and Michelle went on a trip to the Hershey factory. We still hadn’t told anyone about what was happening between us.

 

Charlie and Michelle slept together while blackout. Michelle texted me what had happened. My stomach dropped; I felt like an idiot. I felt betrayed. I had dragged innocent Michelle into my mess. My dishonesty had put our friendship in jeopardy, and I didn’t know if I had a right to ask her forgiveness.

 

Charlie told me it meant nothing, that he didn’t want to be with Michelle, that he had regretted it immediately and had wanted to tell me all weekend. He asked for a chance to earn back my trust, and I let him have it.

 

That week I finally told Michelle what had been happening. 

She told me that there was more to the story. 

She told me that Charlie had been whispering in her ear for months. 

She told me that weekend, Charlie had asked her why they weren’t dating.

Michelle told me the lines that he said to her, then repeated to me.

Michelle told me how he didn’t miss a beat when he cuddled her all night, how that entire day their bodies never broke contact.

Michelle told me how when she said she didn’t want it to happen again he said it seemed inevitable to reoccur.

 

My reality began to crumble. I wondered how I had thought Charlie was someone deserving of my trust. I wondered if we had ever shared anything real, or if Charlie just puppeted back what I wanted to hear. Perhaps Charlie was only a flattering mirror. Perhaps I was not the listener I believed myself to be. I began to question every previous interaction, question my relationships, question myself. What hurt the most was not what he did to me. What hurt the most was the discovery of what he was capable of doing.

 

I lost Charlie.

 

I miss my Charlie. I miss the boy that snuggled into my arm and taught me how to wrestle. I miss his questions, creating a riddle from the world. I miss a ten hour car ride with no fear of an awkward silence. I miss seeing the yearning in others eyes as I talked about our relationship. I miss his calls when he’d go away, and how he could tell I was sad from the sound of my voice. I miss the way he made me feel about myself. I miss missing him, and knowing he’d be there. I miss his warmth.

 

But I don’t miss the Charlie I know now. This Charlie told me I was special, then hurt me the same boring way every other man has. This Charlie took the safety I felt in his arms and shattered it. I can’t reconcile this Charlie’s actions with his words.

 

This Charlie is unrecognizable.

 

My Charlie made life look like I had imagined in my mind. Whenever we were apart it felt like I was being gutted. I looked to my future and I saw him as a constant. I began to make choices around that certainty. I ignored other facets of my life so that I could focus on this definite thing, our friendship. 

 

I know now that Charlie and I have no future together. He used to be my center, and now he’s a cautionary tale. My friends say I’m lucky to have discovered his true colors; they say this loss can be a learning opportunity. I can find the silver lining, the moral of the story.

 

But loss will always be an empty hole. Loss gave me room to grow, but it took my best friend from me. The more I stare into the void, the dizzier I get. When I reread old texts and look at old photos I feel out of sorts. I stare at a life I no longer have. I stare at a person I no longer feel I know. Viewing past happiness makes the present despair all the more obvious.

 

Even as you sit in a bathtub of your own filth, you don’t want to leave the warmth. 

 

No one has compared to him, in the warmth or the chill. No one has loved me so fully and hurt me so carelessly. 

 

I told him that I couldn’t lose him. I could. I did.