I think you feel the way I feel, though you don't want to say
I think you feel the way I feel, though it's not the easy way

It's a little funny how a tired cliché can suddenly seem so profound in the middle of the night.

The house was perfectly quiet and all the voice in my head wanted to talk about was the old idea that a single moment can change your life forever.

Tonight, for the first time, I really felt like I understood what that meant. I knew I should be more remorseful about crossing that line that I really, really didn't mean to cross. But things were bound to change eventually anyway, so why not take the initiative?

Part of me really wanted to hang on to what was already there. But part of me had to know what else there could be.

It was a while before I noticed that the rain had stopped pounding against the roof, the windows, the ground. I looked outside and it turned out that the aggressive rain had frozen into snow that now simply dropped passively.

I fought the urge to call her. Who would know? Who might hear? I could choose my words carefully, keep it ambiguous. "Who were you talking to?" "Oh, just some girl. Sorry I woke you up." If it even came to that. But I'd whisper, just in case.

But fear of being found out wasn't the real reason I successfully restrained myself from dialing that all-too-familiar number.

The real reason, obviously, was that it had been heartbreakingly clear from the shell-shocked look on her face that she had never, ever even considered the possibility of me being anything more to her than a friend, or maybe even just a kid.

Somehow I had thought it would be easier than this.

I hadn't exactly planned on doing what I did, but nothing about our conversation had gone quite the way I did plan. The idea behind it all had been that she secretly felt the way I secretly felt and my first move toward changing the "secretly" part of that would be so smooth and successful that everything would just kind of fall into place.

So, was I wrong? Was it simply the days on end of insomnia that gave her the appearance of being tired, disappointed, and crushingly impassive?

How could I have so completely misjudged our entire relationship?

I knew I should have left things between us the way they were. Everyone had been happy, then--happy about that, at least. And that really was what I had planned to do.

If only the rumors had been true. Then everything could have gone like I thought it would, and I wouldn't be sitting here in the middle of the night trying not to think about the way she's going to avoid me the next time I see her, the awkward, cold silence that will undoubtedly take the place of our old late-night discussions.

But the rumors weren't true, and it was such a relief that suddenly my focus shifted away from her problem, which might have seemed laughably insignificant to someone who hadn't seen the things we had over the years. I realized that she actually risked sounding completely insane to share this with me, when she hadn't opened up about what was going on to anyone else at all. Not even my mom.

I began to wonder if that could possibly mean what I thought it might mean.

I wanted to call. I wanted to hear her say it was okay, that I hadn't destroyed everything forever. But I didn't, because what I wanted most of all was to defy conventional wisdom, and write my own story: it takes two moments can change your life forever; one to screw things up, and the second one to fix it all.

The second moment would be much easier to plan than the first. No more unpredictability.

I knew what I needed to fix and I'd make a plan for fixing it. I'd decide which way to go based on the way she acted around me over the next couple of days. The conclusions drawn from my observation of her behavior would lead me to either push harder for what I wanted to happen, or back off from it entirely, and pretend I never wanted it to happen either.

Both potential paths were pretty scary.

I started to think about those people who say that choosing one option over another creates an alternate universe where another version of you gets to live out your life the way you would have if you'd chosen the unchosen option.

It was kind of a creepy idea, but it did provide a little bit of comfort as I drifted off to sleep.

At least one version of me would get what he wanted.

(I don't want to cause you any pain, I just want to love you
I don't want to fuck up anything, I just want to love you
)

- - -

Lori Carson, "Snow Come Down"