L’amour et l’amitié

Sitting inside a small café with a mug of coffee, steam lingering at the brim, I look at the stranger sitting across from me. The feeling of love hasn’t gone, just changed slightly. Instead of passion I feel a milder caring. I’ve never really had a friend that I felt that for, and I like the feeling intensely. Yet it also saddens me, that there is this hole where so much more feeling was before. It made me think that maybe friendship is something that would perhaps be the better option in this situation, but that can never be a substitute for love and infatuation.

I've given in to the resolution that comes of undefined emotion, I've given in to utter and remorseful numbness. Confusion just becomes this crushing weight that shuts off the feeling, like a limb that has been slept on. So that I'm left here trying my best to recall the feelings I had, not out of desperation... but out of a need to find my way back to a path I felt sure of, was steady on, was comfortable with.

I'm sure that love cannot outlast this numbness. I'm not sure I can ignore that there are now so many striking differences between us. Then, a child rolled past in a pram and all we saw was this child's bare feet. I tell her I've always felt compelled to tickle bare feet, like my mother used to do to me. She confided that she'd always felt like ‘chewing on them’.