I am hurt and upset to a degree that I cannot rightly assess. I am also certain that I deserve it.

Regardless of whether or not that’s true, I’ll deal with it.

Most critically, I’m not cool with some of what I said when I was high on MDA the other night. It makes me honest and genuine to a degree that I can’t usually achieve on my own. But I have since realized that, even wrapped in an unnatural blanket of well-being, I am still more than comfortable lying to myself.

In the case of friends versus lovers, I tend to agree with you, there shouldn’t necessarily be any particular reason that a future romance trumps a current friendship. But I absolutely cannot guarantee this will not happen with us.

I know this from having guaranteed such things before, only to get bitchslapped into that exact situation by the very person I guaranteed. I had sort of assumed a reciprocity clause was implied, and that was my mistake. But let’s face it, I was never going to enforce it anyway. Even if at some point I was actually naive enough to believe I could.

But I survived. Maybe even grew a little.

And you know what? I get it. I’ve had plenty of friends get involved in relationships where, as a direct consequence of said relationships, I interacted with them less. I might see them less, but we’re not lesser friends for it. This, I suspect, is likely a result of us not placing arbitrary parameters around our friendships with regard to how the other relationships in our lives are permitted to affect our friendships.

People drift apart.

Sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. Most often, it’s a mixture of both.

They go home. They leave home. They get jobs with NASA. They find God. They get curbstomped in the McDonald’s drive-thru. They acquire dementia. Or an all-consuming passion for back country kayaking.

It really doesn’t matter how it happens. It’s just likely to happen.

Cohesive attractions. Covalent bonds. Strong interactions.

We are all a series of relationships drifting through space. And, at times, we’re fortunate enough to drift together.