Week 7 Memoir: Platonic Soulmates

I have thought I was in love three different times. The first when I was 17 and I had my first kiss. He told me he loved me and I believed I could love him back so I said I did, even though I didn't really mean it at the time. This was the first time since fourth grade that someone had ever told me they liked me and I just wanted to feel liked, even loved. But we were young and stupid and things ended like they always do. 

Then when I was a year older and felt far wiser I met a boy who kissed really well, we hung out in the summer. Why are summer romances so much more beautiful? The temptation, the heat, the days so long you feel as though you can make anything last forever. But I got scared, he was kind and smart and beautiful and I got caught up in work and a girl and so I ended things.

The girl was the third one, the one closest to love. Funnily enough I never kissed her, we were just friends but I thought I could make her love me. We became friends at the end of our senior year. We spent all summer racing after each other. We went to a Hozier concert, made really terrible lemon poppy seed muffins, painted in the grass of my front yard. I made her watch an embarrassing amount of romance movies and we more than anything just talked. We would talk about good books and religion and how soulmates had to exist. She told me once that sometimes she would be walking down the street or in a store and she would lock eyes with a total stranger and in that moment she knew they were soulmates. For that moment they were destined to be in the same place at the same time. I thought about that a lot. The moment I realized I had a crush on her was early in the summer. We were sitting out in my driveway after the making of the bad muffins and talking. She told me she think she may like girls, which she immediately followed with “ but if I do you're not my type”, I just laughed. I told her that later and she laughed and said “ I really said that? I’m so sorry”.

The summer with her was magical, again falling in love in the summer feels so easy, I became the protagonist in all my favorite movies chasing after the girl. We ended the summer with skinny dipping in Lake Michigan and me not saying how I feel. And then we both went off to college, she went to Michigan State and I went off to Oakland, and then we were apart. We would text from time to time, I called her once when I was crying in my car in the Meijer parking lot and she told me she loved me. And so any time new potential crushes came into my life I could only think of her and this perfect relationship I had created in my head, and I pulled away from them. Then after months of thinking and all these feelings that felt as though they were bubbling over I went and saw her. The weekend I saw her happened to be the worst weekend of my life. I was very sick, very anxious, went to watch my brother lose a water polo tournament and my grandmother almost died. But before all that I anxiously drove to Lansing and picked her up at her dorm. We went to the art museum on MSU campus. She told me that when she and her other friends went they didn't understand the art, but I got it. Somehow I always did. And then we wandered around to a bookstore and a record shop and Target. I read her poems and she talked about getting an eyebrow piercing. And then we walked a long distance to Panera in this big glass building. It had these giant stairs you had to walk down to get to where the food was. There was hardly anyone there late on a Friday night, we both got soup to warm our cold hands and sat at these twisty chairs. I looked up and there were big mirrors covering the whole ceiling. I wondered what someone would think if they were looking at us from afar. Did they see what I had seen this whole time? 

The whole exchange in the end to be honest, was uneventful. 

“Yeah I kind of had a crush on you this summer”.

“Really, that's so funny”, pause then “You know I have thought about it before. I think it would have been easier to have met as lovers first instead of friends”. 

“You're probably right”. 

There were some more words that I frankly was too anxious to remember. And then I dropped her off at her dorm and left to have a very rubbish weekend and overall, I was just left confused. I had thought this would be a big movie scene moment. I had written out a love letter to recite to her, but in the end it was casual, it was messy, there were no clear answers. 

We met again over Christmas break. She was different this time, new glasses, sat up straighter, she seemed like she was becoming who she was meant to be. I asked her if she had thought about what I said at Panera and she said yes. 

“ You're so kind and so pretty and it would be easy to be together even with the distance, but I just can't make myself feel something that I don't”. It was probably the nicest way anyone has rejected someone ever. 

“Your right”. And after that I didn't bring it up again.  

There is a moment where I had to realize I have fantasized a life for myself that doesn't exist. A life where I am in love. But that is not the life I am living, and that is okay. I realized I made her part of that life, she was kind and pretty and understood me more than I often understand myself. She made it easy to love her and so I did. But I ignored her feelings, I ignored logic and most importantly I created a history between us that wasn't there. I told myself I will continually love her even if it doesn't make sense anymore. My life got busy and she kept flourishing at school. 

The ending isn't all sad, she is still one of my best friends. Today I texted her that I had rewatched one of the movies we watched together this summer. It's called 500 days of Summer, it's all about a hopeless romantic Tom who falls for a girl Summer who doesn't believe in love, they have a short lived relationship and then she breaks his heart. I always thought Summer was the worst for breaking Toms heart, all he wanted was love and how dare she deny him that. But this time I understood Summer more, you can not force yourself to love someone that you don't. And I also understood why Tom fell in love with her in the first place, she was easy to love, and everything's better when you are in love. It's easier to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, knowing that someone loves you. And when you have been alone for so long you can convince yourself to love just about anyone, on your own terms. It’s funny I had a boy once who liked me, who was kind, he wanted me to be his girlfriend and I made up excuses saying I was busy with work and was leaving for school. But it was because as hard as I tried I couldn't get myself to love him. But it's so easy to fall in love when it's unreachable. It brings you sadness, which is almost as addicting. Particularly as someone who writes and finds most inspiration when sad. It's almost satirical how much this movie paralleled my own struggles with love. 

What I learned only recently even after my many conversations of soulmates, is people also have platonic soulmates. Someone who they are meant to be with but not in a romantic way. I guess that's what I didn't understand, how we could be so connected. It meant we had to be in love but I was completely wrong. I still think Adrianna is my soulmate, no one else gets me like her, she is kind and loves to learn and I love her just not in the way I thought I had. Even as we go off and do our own things, we will always have this undeniable connection. Sometimes I wonder how I ever lived life without her and yet I did. 

I am a complete utter hopeless romantic. I have watched enough romance movies to know in the end they always get the girl, and I didnt feel complete knowing I didn't. I would not change how things went with her or the others. I’m learning to know love does not make us complete, we are not half empty humans searching for this other piece of ourselves. Insead each time we fall for someone we give a piece of our heart to them. Then we spend the rest of our lives with all the pieces of our heart all over the world letting someone care for them hoping they don’t break it, and sometimes they do. Love does not make us whole it makes us broken. But who are we to deny ourselves the pleasure of brokeness.