We decided to go to 7-11 to replenish our caffeine supplies. He wanted his favorite brand of iced coffee; I wanted some of those Yerba Mate energy drinks. These caffeine treks had become a new kind of love language for us, and my growing feelings manifested themselves in memorizing his coffee order.
He parked the car, turned on Radiohead’s ‘Last Flowers’ and said he’s been thinking about us a lot. I unbuckled my seat belt to get in, but he didn’t. Did we go in?
He said he was thinking about how he’s not ready for a relationship, how he doesn’t want to change the way he spends time with me, how the way we spend time together feels like a relationship, how he’s emotionally exhausted himself with some girl a few months before that i don’t know and can’t do anything about, and how this has nothing to do with me.
I thought about this Radiohead song being a bit of a cliche choice for this conversation.
He asked me questions: Where is my head? Do we continue as we have been? Do we decide to just be friends? He thinks I should be a part of this decision. Do I need time? Did I want to go in with him, or wait in the car?
“I’ll wait in the car.”
He went in.
Hey, I thought. So this is how we talk about ending things.
Here’s another version of this conversation, but it’s from a few months earlier and with a different guy. We were naked in his dorm room together; he had a flight to catch so I lay there while he packed. We’d skipped a football game that night to spend those last few hours together, which I thought might be romantic in the same way I viewed his string lights and vinyl collection as artsy and intellectual.
The brotherhood atmosphere of “Mr. Brightside’ in the hall was too muffled to drown out his stomach-churning announcement: ‘I’ve been thinking, and I’m just saying I don’t see this is more than what’s going on right now. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but that’s how I feel.”
I was taken by surprise and intoxicated and I don’t remember my exact reaction, but it must have been something along the lines of, “OK.”
This reminds me of yet another guy from the summer before whose version of this conversation took place not in a dorm but in our mutual friend’s nursery, as we lay on the blankets wrapped in each other’s arms and talked about how it would be. are to finally go back to school after Covid.
The underbelly of him telling me that he’s “not really looking for anything right now, by the way,” was starting to feel familiar by then, as were the reasons he gave — because everyone’s saying the same things.
They just got out of a long and toxic relationship. They are stressed by school. They don’t sleep enough. They use buzzwords like “emotionally unavailable.” And at least they seem pretty genuine.
In the back of my mind I started to think maybe they just didn’t want to be with them me† Or maybe being a young adult is difficult and confusing. Or maybe this is just how we talk about ending things.
The frat boy was leaving for his flight and I was alone in his room, still naked on the bottom bunk of his bed, unsure whether we had ended things or agreed to continue with what we were already doing – the casual drunken nudity after parties or football games – and pretending we were both equally good at never dating. This confusing gray area would last for a few weeks and then die out, and we wouldn’t talk about it again.
Yes, mister ‘artistic and intellectual’ slept on a bunk bed.
Another version of this conversation: During a hectic and stressful study session before my introduction to statistics class in our school library, my very first and only real friend told me that after four months he had discovered that he didn’t want that title anymore, and suddenly I tried figuring out how to talk about the end of my first relationship in a building where you’re not allowed to talk at all.
I failed at this, and instead focused on trying to cry softly. I also failed at that statistics problem. Obviously, heartbreak is not conducive to first-class calculations.
He eventually left the library and that night we slept in the same bed the same way we had slept in the same bed when we were a couple and in the same way we would continue to sleep in the same bed long after we weren’t.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I found myself talking on the phone for hours every day and traveling across the country to visit him. He learned to move on and want other people, and I learned what it feels like to lose the respect of all my friends. He has to have a girlfriend in all the fun ways and none of the meaningful ways, and I have to pretend we never talked about ending things. Finally, this strange extension of our old relationship, too, ended, this postponed finale 10 times more painful than the original library fiasco had been.
I don’t feel good talking about this relationship now because I’m ashamed of how I behaved at the end, how I convinced myself that being truly alone is worse than accepting that something has ended. And maybe I worry that I still think that. I hope not.
I’m not sure.
In another car, on another day, many years before the 7-11 parking lot, my high school crush and I were sitting in front of a coffee shop, and I asked him if he wanted us to go out. He said yes and I was happy because he was attractive and we had a great time going to the movies and exploring coffee shops and holding hands in parks and kissing in the corners of parties and doing all the things that I thought a relationship was supposed to be like.
And 45 minutes later, still in the coffee shop parking lot, he changed his mind. We were going to college soon and he didn’t want to date anyone, but more importantly, he just wasn’t that interested in me.
Him and I spent the rest of the summer going to the movies and exploring coffee shops and holding hands in parks and kissing in the corners of parties and doing all the things I thought a relationship should be like without ever talking about that conversation again.
I didn’t know how many times I’d have that conversation with other men in other cars or libraries or dorm rooms, how repetitive it is, how humiliating rejection feels at the beginning, but how that feeling always fades, how predictable relationships become when you start to guess when and where these conversations will take place.
But here’s the original version of this conversation.
I was 12 and sitting at my favorite barbecue restaurant, Moe’s BBQ, eating my favorite meal—my mouth full of shredded chicken and Moe’s famous baked beans—when my mom told me she and my dad were splitting up.
Unable to speak or swallow, I ended up spitting the contents of my mouth into a napkin, while the humiliation of not having parents in love was compounded by the humiliation of starting to sob in the middle of Moe’s BBQ. I don’t remember what I said to her, but it must have been brutal and mean, because soon she was crying too. I never went back to Moe’s BBQ, and we never talked or cried about it again.
I didn’t tell my friends that my parents were separated for another four years, and this was easy to do because my parents had moved next door to each other, and we kept celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas together and going on family vacations together and not talking about how it ended .
We acted as if nothing ended, nothing changed.
Now, in the parking lot of 7-11, as I waited alone in the car, I marveled at how that gut feeling didn’t come this time. He emerged with his arms full of Yerba Mate drinks but no iced coffee, and the engine ignition took us back to Radiohead.
Oh god, he had cued the whole album.
I answered his questions. No, we shouldn’t keep doing what we’re doing. Yes, we should be friends. Yes, I will need time. Something has to change.
We talked about ending things, and then we drove home in silence.