Fourteen years ago

New Year's 2004. Adam and I hadn't talked in two weeks. That was typical. I wasn't his girlfriend, after all; I was his best friend and I would understand that he had trouble getting back to people.

I didn't understand. That's why I was cold when he called that day. "So," he said as if we had talked an hour earlier, "what are we doing tonight?"

I took him to the party in Montclair. It was thrown by a few old newspaper colleagues and there were more there, asking questions, questions, questions. I had no answers, just a moribund career and a grad-school dream that was growing moldier by the minute. Not to mention the fact that I was lonely, so goddamned lonely, that I could barely see through my own jaundiced vision.

We drank.

Then we smoked, standing under the stars half hidden by the coming storm.

When Adam put his head in his hands on the back porch, I shrugged and went to go talk to old friends. By the time I returned, there was a pile of --

Oh, shit. Those aren't streamers.

You got to dance with the one that brung you, so I cleaned it up. He spent the night at my apartment that night, passed out on the couch. He left in the morning before I awoke.

So fucking lonely, I thought.

Always will be that way, I knew.

What I didn't realize is that our relationship had come to the uncontainable point where it could no longer be roped in by the bounds of mere friendship. Something had to give.

And something.

And something.