i don’t remember when i stopped hating you. i don’t remember when you became someone i didn’t ever want to lose. i don’t remember when i fell in love with you. i know you think i hated you when you called me ‘jimmy’ but i didn’t. i thought you were cool then, not because you figured out my gender years ahead of me, but because you actually paid attention to me. we had a running joke, sure it led to me getting pissed of a few times but i never hated you for it. what i did hate you for was taking her away. 13 years old and you were the worst thing to ever happen to me. she stopped talking to me as much, she would only ever talk to you, she got so visibly depressed it was hard to watch. i’ve never admitted this but when she said you were planning to kill yourself, i had a tiny part of me celebrate. i knew it was wrong but the thought of having her back was intoxicating. looking back i can see why people thought me and her were in love. but you didn’t die that night, or the week after, after a month or so i got over myself and realized you weren’t going anywhere. whatever, i guess life really does go on. then you started dating her. fuck this. there was no getting rid of you now that you were her boyfriend. when i started to sit with you and her more i would fight you every single fucking day. you always won because your teeth were sharper and my stupid eating disorder i still can’t shake made me too weak to realistically do anything. but then she would start skipping. she would start getting sick every week. we would be left alone together. and we started to talk, like really talk. the first bits were odd at best and boring at worst, you would ask me about cats, fruit, my sister. i would answer and ask back. nothing hard. but then we would start to be alone more. we would run out of easy topics we would talk about being trans, being neurodivergent, our family life. we would sneak off to the out of bounds bushes with two cigarettes, a dollar lighter, and a bottle of her perfume. meet in public bathrooms but instead of her perfume it would be a stolen bottle from any chemist we could find. we would sit on hills with a henna cone while we talked about how similar we really are. i wonder if that had anything to do with my hatred for you. we just grew closer. she found a new friend for the group and they worked together like bread and wine in church. so naturally we became a pair. it was weird. i had spent my whole life with almost no friends aside from her. and even when i had friends, they would always prefer someone over me. i think that was when i stopped calling her my best friend too. but this, us, we felt good really good. maybe a started to see him as someone i wouldn’t mind dating after they broke up but stayed friends. but really who cares if i put on lipgloss before i saw you because you said you liked it once. it was no ones business but mine. then came new years. we swam in the river and you were so cold i gave you my jersey, you wore it for so much longer than you needed to. we smoked the last of my pack on the beach, and drunk a couple vodka sodas with the others. the res is a bit o a blur. we broke into the cleaning closet to cover up the smokey smell, i left my phone on the beach and at some point while we were walking back to the beach you told me that was your best friend because ‘who else would it be?’ you cut my hair short and i had a lot of transgender thoughts, then there were the shots, the other two left because one of them is performative about her drinking and didn’t actually want to get drunk, while the other is to good of a friend. so we were alone. we drank and drank and kissed a lot on the way. i don’t think i was in love with you then but my god am i now.