Saturday, June 4

Dear Journal,

I just got back from Kyle's house. We spent most of the day there, playing the new video game I got him for his birthday and catching up on everything we've missed from each other for the past couple of months. It felt a little awkward when I first got there, but within a few minutes, one of us started ripping on Cartman, and we ended up getting too distracted with fits of laughter to really think about anything else. And things stayed like that—somewhere in the range of normal, us just having a good time together—throughout most of the time I was there.

There was just this one weird moment that happened about halfway through the afternoon.

We were in the middle of fighting off a horde of zombies, and I kept seeing Kyle glancing at me through the corner of my eye. I turned to him and he gave me one of those hey-you-wanna-pause-the-game-for-a-second? looks.

That look scared the shit out of me. I knew exactly what he was thinking about. I didn't realize he'd bring it up today.

But I wasn't about to run away, so I just paused the game and asked what was up. He stared blankly and stammered that it was nothing. There was a quick pause before he changed his answer, saying this time that he had a question for me.

It was not a question I was at all prepared to respond to, but he asked it anyway.

"Why do you love me?"

Like I said, this caught me really off guard. I froze for a moment, not able to say anything.

He could obviously see how uncomfortable this was making me because next he said, "Sorry, I guess it's not fair to ask you about this. But I was just curious what happened to make you feel that way. I mean, how long have you felt like this?" He paused, realizing what he was saying. "You don't have to answer that if you don't want to."

I wasn't going to at first, but then he gave me this look and I found the words spilling out of my mouth before I could control them.

"I don't know dude, I guess I've always loved you in a super best friend sort of way," I turned away, blushing at this next part, "but one day I looked at you and realized there was more than that there. And I guess it just…made sense to me."

He just stared at me, not saying anything. I felt terrible—I must've made him really uncomfortable telling him all that. After a while he just nodded and we went back to playing the game. Neither of us mentioned anything about it the rest of the night. We acted like we weren't thinking about it, but I knew we both were.

I feel bad for making Kyle feel like this. He never saw any of this coming, so now he doesn't know what to expect from me. But I swear, I would never try anything on him, so I don't want him to feel uncomfortable around me.

But I guess I should be glad that things went as well as they did. Really, it could've gone a lot worse. Still, it'll be nice when all this shit is behind us and not the goddamn elephant in the room. Today was just the first day, though-I know it'll get better. Besides, Kyle might feel a little weird around me, but he doesn't hate me. That's the important part.

Actually, that's the really fucking exciting part.

Our friendship is gonna survive this.