when you've outgrown a lover

an autofiction piece about first loves and bad timing

artwork by Holly Warburton

I measure time now in intervals, in the spaces between wanting and having. The intensity at which I miss you tends to change with the seasons: at the height of winter it was sharp and crystallized, but as the days stretch out, it turns to liquid and spills like water through my hands. But some days, I don’t miss you at all—or think of you at all, really—and you’re just a memory. But memory is just another form of fiction—each time we go back to revisit a moment, we just create a newer, more updated version of it, piling on layers of meaning that hadn’t been there before. That might be what I’m really doing when I think about us, just writing and rewriting our story until I’m satisfied. Until it becomes something I can live with and leave alone without disturbing any longer, something that aches in a way I can understand.

We never had a clean break because we never had a proper beginning. Sometimes I wonder if letting go was the bravest thing we ever did. I can still remember in vivid detail the moment everything shifted, how strange it was to suddenly see you in split screen. But timing is everything—this was one of the last things I’d heard you say. We were always finding each other at the wrong moments, turning the corner into a hallway the other inhabited mere seconds after they left. When one of us was healing from someone else, when our lives were pulling us in opposite directions, when we were growing into versions of ourselves that no longer made sense together. What a tragedy it is to outgrow someone you love without even realizing it. But the love doesn’t disappear, not completely, it just turns into something quieter. Sits on a shelf in your heart like a book you don’t need to reread to remember why it mattered.

I watch how other people fall in love, how easily they seem to cross the invisible line between friendship and something else, how organically they lean into each other’s spaces. It makes me think about us, and how we tended to circle each other with a sort of intellectual precision. Always analyzing, always aware. And we were good at talking, that was our thing. We were good at not talking, too—for us, silences weren’t a sign of boredom or a lack of closeness, but meant quite the opposite. It was different with us because we had history. We were best friends, who knew each other’s families, had inside jokes about each other’s embarrassing phases, and could reference specific moments from years ago with the single raise of an eyebrow. The way we understood each other was casual—domestic, even—in the way that couples who had been married for a long time had each other’s moods and mannerisms memorized to a tee. It was all very earnest, in that particular way teenagers can be when they’re trying very hard to seem grown up.

You were dating someone else when I first realized I might love you. Not in the way I always had, the way we would mindlessly remind each other of it before we hung up the phone or parted ways for the time being. It was nothing dramatic. It had been nearly midnight, and I was standing under the doorway arch that connected Ruby’s—well, Ruby’s dad’s—kitchen and living room. Your phone died, so I volunteered my charger and went to grab it for you. Lara—your girlfriend at the time—hadn’t been there, she never quite clicked with our group, so she scarcely showed up to these things. You were sitting on the kitchen counter and engaged in a casual debate with our friends, arguing in favor of some pretentious movie none of us really liked—even you, which is why I found it particularly funny. Endearing, too. You didn’t want the night to end, so you sparked a debate just to keep it alive, to make everyone stay—here, laughing together—and I remember thinking: oh. This is it. What everyone’s been writing about. But classically, I didn’t say anything. I just handed you the cord and joined you on the counter. Your knee brushed against mine as I propelled myself onto the surface, and that was the first time I’d acknowledge the electricity that ran through my body whenever that happened. But that rush had been short-lived, because out of the corner of my eye, your phone hit one percent and its screen lit up.

I watched you check your phone: three texts from Lara. You left them unread, which I found interesting, in the way small decisions can be when you’re trying to understand someone completely. The debate about the film continued. Our friend Dean had been sitting on the floor beneath us, his head against the cabinet, half-asleep but still throwing occasional rebuttals at the points you made about the film. Mark and Aubrey were sat at the table, sharing the last can of whatever it was we had been drinking that night, passing it back and forth, their contributions to the debate making less and less sense with each sip. Ruby was on the couch in the other room, her snores getting louder by the minute. The scene was so familiar, we’d done something like it countless times before. But now, I was experiencing it in a way where I understood what was happening and what it meant simultaneously. The kitchen light cast strange shadows, your knee was still pressed against mine, and I had the immediate, unwanted thought that this is how affairs begin. Not with any grand gesture or declaration, but with the sudden, acute awareness of someone’s body in space, and the way it relates to yours.

I found myself dissecting the way you spoke, how you kept using smart and technical language as a form of distance, the same way you did when discussing your relationship with Lara. I studied your profile in the dim kitchen lighting, the way your hands moved. These weren’t new features to me. But in the new, strange light I saw you, they might as well have been. But I wasn’t really paying attention to the words you were saying, I was just thinking about the way you always talk around things instead of about them. I wondered if that was why you were still with her. Your phone buzzed again, but you’d turned it face down with a deliberateness that felt significant.

Was it always this immediate and disorienting, to realize you loved someone? I almost wanted to ask if everyone else experienced it like this too, where one moment you’re just existing, and the next, every small detail becomes almost painfully laced with meaning. Suddenly it all mattered, and it all mattered so much. But there are some questions you just don’t ask, not with all your friends around, not while he belongs to someone else, even if you’ve known him forever. This night would become something I’d return to repeatedly in my mind, like pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurt. I’d think about how there’s probably a word or specific phrase for the exact feeling of realizing you love someone while they’re checking their girlfriend’s messages on a borrowed phone charger.

But in the moment I just sat there, on the counter, letting my leg rest against yours, participating in the collective fiction that this was just another night, just another debate, just another instance of the kind of platonic intimacy that characterizes friendships in young adulthood. As if we weren’t all constantly one realization away from the kind of chaos that remakes a person entirely. As the night wound down, I caught myself wanting to say something, anything, to keep you there just a little longer. But all I did was smile weakly, help you down from the counter, and watch as you collected your things, including my charger, which you promised to return, but never would. I’ve always assumed you just forgot. You drove me home that night, and as I watched you drive off, all I could think of was how the universe had a cruel sense of timing by showing me what I wanted only after it had become something I couldn’t have.

I remember how the air between us felt thick with possibility, with the weight of a decade’s worth of closeness. What had been building between us felt like vertigo, like standing at the edge of something vast and familiar and terrifying all at once. That night was only the beginning of us falling into each other in slow motion, and even now, I sometimes can’t tell whether we created something beautiful, or just destroyed everything we’d built. The night of the pretentious movie debate was just when I finally saw it clearly, but the truth had been writing itself for years and was only visible in retrospect. Like a photographic negative finally exposed to light, memories began to develop differently, especially the few months when I had been with Silas.

You’d introduced us, which should have been the first sign. There was something careful in how you orchestrated your own absence after that, always finding reasons to step away when we were together, maintaining a precise distance that I now recognize as self-preservation. There was one evening when we were all together in Mark’s living room for Friendsgiving, and you kept yourself just far enough away that nothing could blur. I remember catching your reflection in the mirror behind the couch while Silas had his arm around me. And you were watching us with this expression I couldn’t read at the time, but it was the same look you’d get when talking about Lara. When Silas went to join the pool game, you slid into his vacant seat, but positioned yourself slightly away from me, kept a purposeful gap that spoke volumes in hindsight.

You seem happy, you’d said, like you were trying to convince yourself of something. I’d then launched into some story about Silas and you listened with an intensity that I mistook for friendly interest. When Silas came back to us, you’d made some excuse about meeting other friends, though it was nearly 1 a.m. on a Tuesday. The way you’d patted him on the shoulder as you got up—so resigned, like you were handing over something precious. But of course, I’d thought nothing of it then. It was during this moment of retrospection that I finally understood why you spent the next three months avoiding group gatherings, started dating Lara out of nowhere, why you never quite looked at me directly.

Now, years later, when I’m waiting for the light to change at certain intersections, I wonder to myself if you’ve ever been at this exact spot, thinking about whatever it is you think about these days. If you still drive that old car your uncle helped you fix up, still collect movie ticket stubs, still drink your coffee black just to seem more brooding and serious. Or if you’ve finally accepted you really do prefer it with tons of sweetener, the same way I always make mine, the same way I insisted you did back then but just wouldn’t tell anyone. It’s weird for me to think about how we breathe the same air and exist in the same geographical space, just in our own separate orbits. It hits me at the most random moments and I get caught up in my own whirlwinds of nostalgia, suddenly feeling like that sprightly seventeen-year-old who thought anything was possible, instead of the nervous wreck I’ve become at twenty-four. I’ve always considered us akin to parallel lines that could only intersect if one of us just shifted our angle slightly, but maybe that’s the whole point of everything. We talk about you sometimes, my friends and I, when we’re delirious enough to be honest about these things. You don’t know them. These are people I met long after we stopped speaking, who have only ever met you in stories I tell, only know you through the words I write, as a construct of my own narrative.

I wonder if your brother told you I’m here, too, or if you’ve done the mental math. Probably not. I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t have known or thought to look it up had my sister kept quiet about it. You were always the better one at moving forward and treating the past as past. I’m the one who turns everything into metaphor, who reads meaning into location coincidences. But I can’t help it—the city feels different now that I know you’re in it. Like each corner could be the one where we finally run into each other. We’d both be polite, of course, perform the right amount of surprise. How long have you been here? one of us might ask, pretending not to know. We would probably make vague plans to get coffee, both knowing we wouldn’t follow through. Very adult, very civilized. Nothing like the adolescents who used to break into gated communities and run through the golf course and stay up all night on the phone, who thought we’d always be in each other’s lives in some capacity.

But we don’t run into each other. The city is both too big and too small for that kind of coincidence. And so here we are: two characters in different stories that just happen to share a setting. It’s almost literary, the way we both tried to escape in our own ways, and ended up tracing similar paths without knowing. You got the job first, I think. I remember the FaceTime with my sister, how she found out you’d moved in September, and how I nodded as if this information meant nothing to me. That means for a year, without knowing, we were making the same drive up the interstate, watching the landscape flatten out into valley, fields stretching endlessly on either side. You probably have your routines. Favorite lunch spots, running paths, bars where you meet friends after work. I have mine. The library where I spend too many hours, the café where I proofread papers, the park where I go to read when the weather’s nice. Sometimes I wonder if these patterns ever overlap without our knowledge. With our luck, probably not. But it still feels like it means something, somehow, that we both ended up here. I suppose our teen selves weren’t entirely wrong about everything, just about the specifics.

The thing about growing up in a small town is that leaving it, whether momentarily or for good, is ritualistic. We all perform it differently. Some people go far away, and some people just go next door. I imagine we were looking for the same thing: a place where we could try on new versions of ourselves without erasing the old ones. Somewhere big enough to get lost in, but small enough that the stars are still visible on clear nights. It’s funny how it works, the way home can be both the place you’re running from and where you’re running to. How we place distance between who we were and who we’re becoming. But I don’t know you anymore, and I can’t know for sure, but I think that’s why we both chose to run here—far enough to feel like leaving, but close enough to still call it home.

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