You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Blog is About You - And it is

Birthdays were our thing. Sounds ridiculous, but they were. On our second date, which was also our second time ever meeting, you came to my birthday party. Which wasn’t even a big party, but it was the night of our first kiss.  

I remember all of my friends were in love with you. Understandably so. You were charming, had a killer smile, and let’s be honest, you’re pretty easy on the eyes. Your looks are what initially made me hunt you down, as shallow as that sounds. Yep, I found you.

My friend spotted you at her place of work, knew you were just my type, and would talk about you every few weeks when you’d fly in, until finally, I suggested the idea of finding you on Instagram and sending you a message. I complimented your instagram page, which was filled with airplanes and dog photos. I knew you’d message me back if you thought I was cute. And you did. 

You didn’t even ask how I found you. You had no selfies, barely any followers, and no concern for how the hell some random girl stumbled upon your empty instagram page or why she was hitting on a total stranger on the internet. 

As far as you knew, I didn’t even know what you looked like. Took me a year to tell you how I actually found you, and of course, you were completely unphased. In fact, you were amused. We even facetimed that friend (that initially spotted you), two years later, so you could meet the person who actually introduced us. 

What you didn’t know is that I saw right through you from the beginning. From our very first drink at the bar. I totally got it. The looks, the job, the mysteriousness about you. I could just imagine all of the gorgeous women who threw themselves at you on a daily basis. What a shock to your system it must’ve been for you to meet someone that refused to even let you see the inside walls of her apartment for over a year.

But you did get there, didn’t you. You were my escape from a bad relationship, from a shitty date, from a boring month. 

You were my fun time. And we did have fun. We had a lot of fun. I remember facetiming you at 2am one night after a horrendous date while you were mid shower, you answered anyway. You always answered. After laughing about how embarrassing my hinge date-gone-wrong went, you told me you would remedy my crappy night with lunch at one of my favorite spots the following day. Which ended up being a four hour lunch date. 

In my first year of knowing you, you were my “once in a while date” and my go-to for anxiety relief whenever I stepped foot on a plane. If there was unexpected turbulence or the lights were on during a red eye, you were the one I would text so you could remind me that I would not die.

Year two of knowing you was when things got tricky, right? Because that was when we actually became close. That was when I started to learn more about the real you, not the facade you present to the world.

Our typical flirty games started to evolve into consistent, real communication. Daily facetimes, exchanges of memes, and stupid, stupid marco polos. The app I downloaded because you sent me some shady invite to see my face even more than you already were.

My favorite night with you was when we got wasted at that nearby sushi spot to celebrate my birthday the following year and laughed till we almost cried on the uber ride back to my place because the driver’s navigation had a peculiar echo. Once we got back to my apartment, we laid there in bed, as I opened up to you about parts of my life that I hid from most people. To my surprise, you sweetly kissed me on the forehead in response to my unloading of baggage and then held me for the entire night. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. And I wasn’t upset about it. That was when I knew I was in trouble. 

I would have to take breaks from you, because I felt myself getting a bit too close at times. But that became our joke didn’t it? We’d fake break up, you’d charm me back into your life, and the cycle would repeat. Again and again. My friends knew about you, but only by your nickname. Until you started to become more real.

Like when you were caught leaving my apartment that day my friend was meeting me to carpool to work. Or when you came over while another friend was staying with me, and spent 2 hours talking to her about eating insects. I wanted to kill you that night because I had a very early morning and you kept going on about which bugs tasted the best. 

It wasn’t until that one summer, that I wasn’t able to continue the cycle like I had before. There were some real feelings bottled up inside me, as much as I tried suppressing them. I started to actually care about the other women in your life that I’m sure you were seeing. Like the retired playboy bunny, the tennis player, or any of the others that we once talked about so lightheartedly when opening up about our dating lives.

Being the self proclaimed great communicator you supposedly were, I was very taken aback when communicating your feelings turned out to be quite the struggle. You got completely spooked when I started becoming even a little sweet with you. When this happened, I tried communicating through the distance I started feeling between us. Which, I later learned, scared you even more. And that’s when it all started to go downhill.

When I finally opened up about my feelings for you, you went silent. For THREE weeks. 

At that point, I thought you had either died or maybe I was an absolute insane person that imagined the whole thing in my head. But after shooting you with a double text to check in, you unleashed all of your feelings as well. You sent me about 40 messages. And I was incredibly overwhelmed. All of a sudden, it dawned on me that you did care a lot about me and it was not all in my head.  And naturally, I turned into you and I freaked out. 

All of a sudden, my mind was racing with the possibility of being with you and I got completely and overwhelmingly spooked. I was now the one not texting you back, ignoring your many facetimes, and sitting there, not knowing what to do. I didn’t know how I felt.

When I did finally reach back out to you, I thought I didn’t want a relationship. I thought I was about to hurt you with this information, until you told me you had no intentions of dating me either. After sending me all of those messages and telling me how you felt about me, it appeared we were on the same page. Which was our comfort limbo zone. 

And that totally worked! Until it didn’t. Because quickly after that mutual understanding, I realized I was very confused about how I felt. We attempted to have many conversations about it that went nowhere. You hated talking about feelings. You would just sit there and tell me I looked beautiful as I attempted to verbalize my jumbled ball of emotions.

Again, it went nowhere. Only became a little uncomfortable for us both, as I didn’t know where the hell we stood at that point.

But we continued our friendship. Things were a little weird for a while there. Like when you came to my apartment so we could celebrate your birthday and we didn’t touch outside of a hello/goodbye hug. I remember on your way out, you attempted to show off your lock picking skills on my door (like the psycho you are), only to end up reassuring me just how secure my apartment was, after we argued about the importance of a deadlock bolt. I won that argument.

I was finally adjusting to this new platonic friendship of ours, until I had a significant loss in my family. I remember collapsing in the handicapped stall in the women’s bathroom at my office, not wanting to move. I was told I could go home early, and so after a little bit more crying alone on the floor, I did. 

The first person to call me after this happened, was you. I remember I cried to you for an hour. You were in your car, in between flights, and you just sat there and let me feel what I needed to feel. I don’t even remember what you said to me. But you were there. And that meant everything to me.

After this, any awkwardness between us had passed and we were right back to normal. Again, until we weren’t. Like when you started showing a little bit of your jealous side again, when I’d mention new guys. I remember you’d tell me, “I don’t want you to be with a musician” or “I don’t think this guy is right for you.” But it was every guy. No guy was right for me, apparently. You wouldn’t even set me up with one of your friends, because you “liked me too much.”

And apparently no one was right for you either. There was always something wrong with one of the 15 girls you were entertaining. So I had to ask, to humor myself, what went wrong with us? And this was when a new can of worms was opened. As you told me, nothing went wrong. You just got “scared” a year ago, still had feelings for me, and in your mind, the door was still open for us. I was not prepared for this answer.

And this is where we messed up. We tried making us something we’re not. I say we, but honestly, maybe it was me. Because that very night you told me the door was still open for us, that changed things for me. Because I realized I did still have some feelings. And maybe the door was open for you too.  

You really tried at first, I felt it. You tried to be reassuring, to give me what I needed, to be consistent. All things that truly were not your strong suit. But then it happened. About 3 months in, you got spooked yet again and shut down. We’d been here before. We were getting too close and you shut down. 

You know, you did tell me very early on how much anyone having expectations of you terrified you. Typical dismissive avoidant. But I thought I was different. Typical anxious preoccupied. I actually still think you did want something to work with us. Because, in a lot of ways, we did work. But in a lot more other ways, we didn’t. 

I can’t really explain why I held onto the idea of you for so long, but if I had to guess, it was because I ended up doing what all the girls did I’m sure. I romanticized you. Which is exactly what you wanted me to do, right? Have me picture the weekend getaways to Hawaii, being your plus one to your boujee little events, you wanted to be the escape. And you were.

You were my escape until I grew out of wanting an escape. Being that you are 9 years older than me, I thought you would’ve grown out of it too. But you are you and I am me. I think we were who we needed each other to be when we needed it. And now we aren’t. 

You always wanted me to write a blog about you. Well, here it is. Our “chapter.” And now it’s closed. 

xo,

Renee