In the last column I wrote before the end of the semester, I was heavily contemplating whether or not I should confess my romantic affection to my friend, Emile. On one hand, if things worked out, we would have the perfect amount of face-to-face time together before summer break.. Then, we could spend the summer months making sure we still liked each other after some time apart. On the other hand, maybe I would confess, he would be disgusted, tell everyone he knows that I tried to hit him up, and since we live together (suitecest …) everything would be awkward and I wouldn’t be able to enter the common room for the next month.
However, after lots of conversations with my friends, a few Substack posts and a detailed pros and cons list, I decided that I would be more miserable not telling him than if I did. I attempted one night when we were both conveniently walking back from the gym at the same time, but of course, there were people walking three feet in front of us. I made the conscious decision not to bring anything up, delaying my master plan.
That next afternoon, he walked me to my class, and I stopped him before I went in. I told him I had something to tell him, but I freaked out (as you do) and came up with some bullshit response instead.
Discouraged, I was just about to give up, pack it in and let it go, but then I thought about how I had a lot of things happening in the next few weeks. I knew that if I didn’t do it today, I never would. In a last-ditch fit of determination, I texted him one last time and asked him to meet. At about midnight on April 15th, we met outside at a park bench and sat down. The perfect scene for my epic confession.
For some reason, even though what I wanted to say was on the tip of my tongue, I was paralyzed.
We sat in that weirdly awkward state, where, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. That not-so-blissful, mostly silence was occasionally interrupted by me asking some random questions to make me less nervous.
About 50 minutes into our awesome silence session, he tells me that he knows how I write my thoughts in my notes app and wants me to read off what I wrote down. For a brief, fleeting moment, I daydreamed about me dramatically reading my confession letter while fireworks went off in the background, jazz music playing faintly from a distance, maybe even an audience clapping. In another version, it’s pouring rain, yet there is not a single umbrella in sight, and I shout my confession into the storm while he grabs my face and kisses me like a movie scene.
Instead, at the hour mark, we return to reality, with me asking him, “Would it be super lame if I handed you my phone and let you read what I wrote instead?”
And that’s how the confession happened. I put the phone face down between us. He reads. Complete silence. He takes a breath, looks me dead in the eyes and says, “Thank you for telling me.” Quite the climax.
At this point, even though I should probably feel like jumping off the ends of the Earth, I felt strangely happy. I know that anything that follows “thank you for telling me” is not what I hoped for, but for one reason or another, I don’t feel like hurling myself into the void. Instead, the weight is off my shoulders and I have a story to tell my friends over Sunday morning Scripps brunch.
He continues to tell me that I’m his favorite person he met that semester and that he enjoys hanging out with me, but he’s “not looking for anything serious right now.” I said, “Awesome,” which was my own way of saying, “thank you for being honest, I’m disappointed, but relieved that the air was cleared.”
We went back inside and talked a little more. The next day, after sitting with our thoughts for a bit, we asked each other questions about the whole situation. It can be awkward sometimes, but other times it’s easy. He was patient, kind and he remembered small details that made me feel seen. The strangest part was how normal everything felt.
Ironically, after all that, nothing cinematically profound happened. There was no kiss, no passionate love confession in the rain, no “you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this.” He didn’t even really give me a reason to move on. He simply gave me the truth.
Either way, I wanted to share the fun (and extremely embarrassing) story anyway. Because at the end of the day, I learned that telling someone the truth doesn’t always ruin things. Sometimes it just makes for a “silly thing that happened that one time.” And maybe that’s the big lesson I learned.
I still like to tell this story at Sunday brunch.
“ It’s a little embarrassing, very vulnerable and a lot human. ”
It sometimes makes me want to scrape out my eyes and eardrums with one of those really wide Frary spoons, but it also makes all of my friends spin around with glee and anticipation. So I persist.
Tom Cat doesn’t give a @#!? if anyone thinks of her as their favorite person this semester. Tom Cat is Tom Cat’s favorite person! Yeah! But if anyone maybe wanted to take her out on a date, please email editor@tsl.news.
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