Let’s just keep this between us, OK?, but I’ve got the big time hots for a friend of mine except they transcend the hots, if you know what I mean; I’ve got the swoons for her, if you know what I mean; I get thoughts of uncooked rice and jewelers’ loops when she comes around, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

            Except, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think of her all that often and when we hang out there’s no sense of like yearning.

            I just get this contented smirking gaze now and then as one of her anecdotes starts winding around and curving back on itself where I’m like, “Please eat a meal with me every day and talk like this.”

            It’s odd.

            There’s an unspoken thing where, while making it fairly clear that we’ve each got enjoyable sex lives going on, we never discuss particulars. We allude to sex only in the abstract. Some strange, unspoken, intimate courtesy that I think is more a product of her making than mine.

            I’m grateful for it.

            As I’ve said, though , I’m working fifty hours a week between two jobs, sometimes more, while at the same time juggling a blog, a podcast, putting the finishing touches on a novel and staying abreast of the news and presumably watching a thousand movies. So there isn’t very much headspace left over to contemplate a relationship or even the prospect of discussing a relationship—cuz we’re good friends, and the friendship is great, and to even try inching it toward something else—I can just tell—it’d make things weird.

            What interests me about it is that it isn’t the sort of unrequited swooning that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would write about, where I’m picking the petals off of flowers and whiling away the hours and hoping in the end that she will want me.

            It’s so placid! It’s cerebral and affectionate, a certainty that this is a person with whom I could share a million moments and not get annoyed (though I suppose everyone thinks that about their prospective partner).

            I think of travel, for instance: there are so few people with whom I could imagine sitting comfortably in an airport, and then a plane, and then a train, and then getting lost in a strange city and scolded by a cop, probably sustaining some injury on a cobblestone road, before finally turning up at a hotel room feeling flustered and tired and hungry and jet lagged…and despite all those travails, and my decidedly unsocial mood, I feel a kind of heavy certainty that, were this person there beside me, I would turn to her in my sweaty lvivid redfaced funk, certain I would never travel anywhere again, and I would ask her, “Do you want anything?”