I recently had a friend.

What an odd thing to write. What a pathetic thing to write. After all, who has a friend for only a little while….I mean, a real friend. I suppose that is the point.

I met this man late last fall. He was fantastic fun to be around and we had an instant connection. We love the same music, live similar lifestyles, like to talk about the same things; we became almost constant companions. It was weird…he was the first friend I made after leaving my husband, so he didn’t know me within the context of my old life. For that very reason, he was a comfort to be around in the early weeks of my divorce process…weeks spent away from my children and otherwise in a high-stress season, when it would have been too painful to be around my friends with families and activities like the ones I’d just had stripped away. I wasn’ t looking for a new friend, certainly not anyone to be “more” than a friend…the surprise made it all the more flattering. After all, here was someone looking at me, listening to me…after 13 years of being mostly invisible.

I met him on a full moon night…the kind of moon that hangs so heavily in the sky that you feel like you could just reach out and touch it. We laughed and talked late into the night. He listened…having been through a divorce himself before, he was able to give me an idea of what certain things would be like as I faced them. I listened…he has lots of interests and is involved in things that were new to me. He played the guitar for me in dusty sunshine and we got up early one day to meet on the beach for a sunrise.

Another full moon passed.

My life is complicated right now. That is absolutely true. There are other things that are true in each of our lives that makes friendship difficult to navigate. What we both knew is that our connection was more than mere friendship though and it took restraint to keep it within honorable bounds. He began to retreat behind walls of restraint…taking my trust with him because I’d given it. Trouble was…I didn’t have access behind those walls and I wasn’t sure what he’d do with my trust. Would he safely keep it? Was I being paranoid when I felt our “energy” was off?

It turns out not. He wanted to “pull back”…a nebulous phrase considering we were friends, albeit close ones. What were going to pull back to? Being acquaintances? Like we don’t each have enough people to exchange small talk with in our lives already? I’ve never had a friend say before anything that sounded like that. Get too busy to get together much? Sure…happens all the time and real friendship picks up where it left off. Have a disagreement and need to cool off? Now and then…real friendship survives it, and usually, is stronger for it.

But this was different. This was rejection. Without offering any explanation other than, “that is how I felt then, this is how I feel now”, he left me on the door step. The third moon was hanging overhead.

I was his Flavor of the Month. What troubles me most is how “off” my radar was for a flake. He seemed utterly genuine…I still feel like those early weeks I saw into the most pure, more transparent, real “him” there was to see…the veil from thereon was obvious enough.

I’m glad I never introduced him to my children. I’ve seen enough of a glimpse of what fire any new person in our lives can be.

Oh my…it’s so cliche…but the guy even has a song in my library. I love music…love to find lyrics that express so succinctly what I struggle to say. And so, Goodbye, My Almost Lover. You were fun while you lasted and oh, hurting me was so unnecessary.