The fire chapter (2 of 6)

She came through magnetic waves and modern technology. Telephone. Lights. Internet. She came after a long, long wait.

And she said: “Hi, where are you typing from?” because it was fashionable to do so, in those days. A much more innocent time, for all of us. A time to believe. Time for ignoring so many things.

I made songs for her. Wrote poems for her.

I was still a shithead.

“I think of you as a friend”, she said. This line pretty much defines it all. Unbelievable. Not only by the evidence of my failure, but also by the insistence in this concept: friendship.

I don’t really have the patience to tell it all again. I have earlier books, you see, and I wrote a lot about this girl already. It would be useful to repeat it, but I won’t.

A platonic love – it should be enough to say – and a best friend. He could have made it all right. I gave him all the chances. I told him: “Go for her. She wants you, not me. I don’t care. It’s ok” He could have just done it all clean. But I guess it wasn’t fun enough. He told me: “No, no, no... You’re my best friend. I don’t like her, anyway...” He had to lie, I don’t know why. He didn’t like her, really. But stabbing people in the back seems too attractive to some. He just had to do it.

Today, all of this sounds silly and childish to me. I can’t feel nothing at all about this anymore. She is my friend, today. We talk a lot. He’s ok with me too. Not a friend, FRIEND, but ok. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a friend like the ones I had in my childhood anymore. I can’t trust him. I can’t trust people. He showed me people will lie no matter what. I feel nothing at all about this today, but guess I’m the only one who realizes all the other things I can’t feel because of that.

I can’t feel towards my friends what I felt as a child anymore. He was the last one. That unconditional trust you have till you discover friends are just a bunch of other people. That connection I imagined, it only existed in me and in the movies I watched. It’s a harsh truth.

They say the astronauts come back a little bit crazy. That they cannot behave normally anymore, after realizing everything they ever knew is no more than dust over a small ball floating in space. They cannot feel the same any longer.

I hope no extraordinary situation turns your best friends into enemies in your mind. I contract my muscles, as I sleep, and my back hurts – for years.

But, apart from that, guess it was all silly and childish. Just that.

If they can’t kill me, they’ll make me stronger - or at least stranger.

Besides, she was really beautiful, and confused and adorable. I feel justified. I’d spill my blood for her. After washing my eyes and seeing things as they truly were, this was my very first lesson about them.

I was a shithead. What should I expect? For her to like me?