entry #1, 4/2/2024 10:44PM

hello.

i forgot to mention i may talk about things unrelated to trauma/sadness/anger. this one's gonna be about my feelings i have towards someone i know.

i have a friend who i would consider to be one of my very best friends and, for the sake of staying anonymous, he's going to be called john. 

we met ten years ago in minecraft along with a few other friends i still have to this day. my first impression of him was that he was some know-it-all jerk that i didn't really know much about/didn't care to know much about. it didn't take long for the two of us to sort of get along. we'd help each other with builds and whatnot but still we didn't really click as friends. not in my eyes, anyways.

at the time, i was the only girl in our little group of friends. of course, at the time, i believed i was a lesbian and so i made it my entire personality. one day after school, i opened minecraft and hopped onto the server we all played on. one of our other friends had told me that john had something of a crush on me. i thought it was funny but also sad, because i believed i was lesbian.

we played on the server for a little while, until john showed up. i don't exactly remember the turn of events after that but i do remember softly rejecting him and making my minecraft character crouch and give his minecraft character a kiss on the cheek. that was that. i pretended he never had a crush on me and he did the same. we continued being friends and got closer.

fast-forward some years later, i want to say five or six years. i was now one of the boys so i was going through this whole identity thing, changing names every few months and trying to figure out how to dress. for a long time i assumed myself to be pansexual but i never really thought about it as hard as i had with my gender.

i was hanging out with the group and john a lot. mostly john. john and i would have calls between just the two of us, playing minecraft, or ye olde midnight banter. it got to a point where i'd think of him a lot everyday. he'd talk about not having much to eat at his house, or how much of an asshole his dad was and i'd fantasize about going grocery shopping for him, buying whatever he wanted to eat, getting him away from his dad and moving us and all of our friends into a shared apartment.

for a while i didn't know it but i was having something of a crush on him. once i realized that i was crushing on him, i freaked out. i knew it wouldn't go anywhere if i'd asked him out and even then i was way too terrified to ask him out anyway. so i went to one of our mutual friends and freaked out to them about it before we came up with something that would actually help me.

i knew i needed to get over these feelings but, in my eyes, the only way i could do that was if john knew how i felt about him. so i told our mutual friend to tell him that i'd been crushing on him for years now and so they told him. i remember i was so terrified he would leave me, either feeling too awkward to talk to me again or from disgust that i'd been madly, gayly in love with him. i cried and i shook with my phone notifications on silent the whole time it happened, too scared to see a message of "we can't be friends anymore" on my lock screen. 

of course, i was being terribly irrational and scared, because he didn't leave. he was very understanding about the whole thing, typing a whole paragraph to our mutual friend about how he was okay with it. after the whole ordeal was over with, i had finally checked my notifications, saw i had a few messages from him and a few from our mutual friend.

i read john's paragraph about three dozen times. it went along the lines of "i'm your friend, we will always be friends and something as silly as this won't stop me from being your friend." but there was something else. it wasn't that he didn't reciprocate the feelings, actually. whenever i read the paragraph he sent, i always reread the part where he says (and this is verbatim to the actually message) "i'd date him too, but-" (verbatim ends) and the "but" was, in short, "we can't date because if we break up i don't want it to ruin our friendship." and i am so happy he said no to dating me.

the next time we hung out, i pretended it never happened and so did he.

time went on, my feelings for him didn't go away but now i was denying they even existed, chocking up the way his laugh made me feel as being "i just like to make my friends laugh", or the way i'd intently listen specifically whenever he spoke as being "i just like to listen to my friends talk". maybe it was a little true. i like to make people laugh and i like to listen to people talk but it felt different when it was him and that's why i was still crushing on him.

a couple of years ago, i eventually found myself a "partner" of sorts. we had a strange start, as they hardly knew anything about me but i knew way too much about them since they would often come to trauma dump in our messages and i would offer my help where i could. they were way too open and i am way too closed off, so not an ideal pair of people to be put into a relationship, i think. especially after the experience i had with them.

they came to me one day and said "i've had a crush on you for a while." and i didn't know what to really think, as nobody had ever expressed being romantically interested in me. at least not since john and i were young. so it made me feel happy, or special, i'm not entirely sure. it felt good that someone thought i was worthy of being loved in that way. they asked if i felt the same way about them and, in reality, i didn't reciprocate but i said yes anyway because i didn't want to hurt them.

i should've said no but i just ended up telling myself "i'll just learn to love them, no big deal."

so for a while, we were just a weird mess. i'd never been in an actual relationship before them so i didn't know how to act like a boyfriend but we love-bombed each other a lot and i thought that's what being in a relationship was. we got closer as time went on, i started sharing more about myself because i believed we would be together forever and shared some of my deeper feelings with them in the form of my writing. they were the only person i ever hung out with and i hung out with them all of the time, when before i had usually stayed alone by myself a lot of the time while hanging out with friends briefly in between the stretches of solitude.

it was a very hard shift from being able to have some of my time to myself into having all of my time being spent talking to them. after a while, i realized it made me kind of exhausted and unhappy to be in a relationship like that, so we had a talk about how i liked to be by myself sometimes and we seemed to work it out together. i thought it was all fine.

until my partner had talked to me about how they didn't feel like i was putting much into our relationship when i felt like i was trying my damned hardest to do good in my first ever relationship. that was when i decided i didn't want our relationship to continue, so i broke up with them. we remained friends and even grew closer than we had before and it felt like breaking up was the right move, as i liked being platonic soulmates with them. i believe we sort of slipped into a friends with benefits type of deal, though i don't want to get into the gory details of that out of fear of being deleted.

we still acted like a couple without actually being a couple.

it didn't end well and we went our seperate ways last july. that's all i'll say about it for now but the whole situation made me realize i'm probably on the aromantic spectrum.

and that's where my thoughts come in. after i stopped having all of my time taken up by my, now ex, partner, i began to hang out with all of my friends again and especially john, as he seemed more keen on hanging out with me than he had before. then my feelings for him flooded back in and i'd realized they never really went away but i saw them in a different light now that i'd actually been through a romantic relationship.

i don't want to be with him, together in a romantic relationship with my feelings being reciprocated. i like it the way it is now. i love to help him where i can, i love to listen to him whenever he talks about one of his projects, or rambles about a video game he's really into. i love to be there for him, i'd do anything he asks. i don't expect or want him to do the same, because seeing him do his own thing is what makes me love him so hard. i'm enamored by his life, his nature, his feelings, his thoughts and, of course, his smile and laugh. he's the smartest, most creative, loveliest guy that i know.

i'm okay with basking in his radiance and not being a part of it. he shines brighter without me and i'm in love with that. i'd probably classify my feelings for him as being a hardcore platonic infatuation. i don't know, really. i just care about him deeply. him and his girlfriend, because she makes him so happy and it makes me so happy to see him happy. i want them to stay together forever.

that's all.