Let me tell you about the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to me, and I have a pretty high bar for humiliation. The last time we spoke was on July 13th, which was his birthday. I wished him. He replied in a very cold manner. So unnecessarily cold that I decided, right then and there, that I was done. I was not going to talk to him ever again.
Obviously I was going to talk to him again.
But I didn't know that yet, so I spent the next few weeks feeling very noble about my decision. Then September happened. I was out with my friend and her boyfriend, which, already, is a situation designed to make a single person feel slightly insane. I posted a story. I posted in the comfort of knowing that Ryan and I had not spoken in months and he had absolutely no reason to respond to it. He responded to it. With a blank face emoji.
And then the next morning, he posted a story.
Now here is where I need you to understand something. Ryan had a best friend named Yash, who he treated like a brother. Yash's girlfriend had come to the city sometime in August and Ryan had apparently been helping her "explore the city." I had seen the occasional photo and thought nothing of it because obviously a guy does not betray his childhood best friend. That is a basic human rule. Even I, who have been called petty by multiple people, know that rule.
I was giving him too much credit.
The story he posted was intimate. The kind of story you only post in close friends. And I need to pause here because this is the part that really got me: I was not in his close friends. I had never been in his close friends. He added me to his close friends specifically to post that story, and then I assume removed me immediately after, like I was a target and this was a very efficient operation. I was home alone when I saw it.
I want to say I handled it well. I did not handle it well.
The thing is, it wasn't even about losing him. I want to make that very clear. I had already accepted, somewhere in the rational part of my brain, that this was going nowhere. But there is a difference between something being over and someone choosing someone else over you, and that someone being, and I'm going to be honest here, not exactly the competition I expected.
She was a villager. Not in a rude way. In a factual way. She lived in a small town. She had no table personality. She was not fit. And look, I am not a shallow person, but I am also a person who just watched someone post a cozy close-friends story with a girl who could not have been in a more different league from me if she had tried. My ego did not just take a hit. It shattered. It hit the floor and kept going.
I kept thinking: why. Why her. What does she have. What did I do. Was it my fault. It was probably my fault. I hadn't been communicating properly. I had been confused. I had been distant. I had essentially handed him a reason to go find someone else and he had found the least expected someone else possible, which somehow made it worse.
And then, on top of everything, I suddenly remembered that I had also spent the last several months ignoring most of my friends because I was focused on him. So now I had no guy, no friends to call, and a story burned into my brain that I could not unsee. Incredible. Really excellent series of decisions on my part.
The only silver lining was Lila. Lila and I had what I would describe as a complicated relationship, which is a polite way of saying we were rivals who were nice to each other's faces. I had been dreading facing her because I just knew that she would take one look at the situation and think: he didn't even choose her. Win for me.
But Lila was too busy having her own breakdown to focus on mine.
Here's the thing about Lila's friends though. I am her rival. I have never pretended to like her that much. But I would never, not once, send someone a devastating story in the middle of the night while they're already in pieces. Lila was getting panic attacks, and her girlfriends were sending her Ryan's stories at 2am like it was content. As an enemy, I was being more decent to her than her actual friends. Make it make sense.
Facing Lila turned out to be fine, by the way. Very anticlimactic. I had built it up so much in my head that I think I expected cameras and a studio audience. There were none. Life is boring like that.
And then there was the Yash situation, which I found out about later and which made everything simultaneously worse and more satisfying. Yash was Ryan's best friend. Childhood best friend. The kind of friend Ryan would describe as basically a brother, which, I want you to remember that word, brother, because it becomes very relevant in approximately two paragraphs.
Aastha was Yash's girlfriend. She had come to the city sometime in August, and Ryan had been spending a lot of time with her, showing her around, helping her settle in, being a very good and supportive friend to his basically-a-brother's girlfriend. Very noble. Very wholesome. Except that is not what was happening at all.
What was actually happening was that Yash had no idea. Yash genuinely believed that Aastha and Ryan were hanging out because she had gotten into some kind of fight with Yash, and Ryan, being the devoted friend that he was, was helping sort it out. Playing mediator. Being the bigger person. Yash was sitting somewhere feeling grateful that his best friend was out there trying to save his relationship while his best friend was quite literally doing the opposite of that.
And Aastha, look, I try not to have opinions about girls I don't know. I really do. But I later found out that she was the one who made the first move on Ryan. She came to the city, stayed with him, let her boyfriend believe it was all very innocent, and then proposed to the guy. She proposed. To her boyfriend's best friend. To someone who had just told me, not that long ago, that he had feelings for his ex and he is not ready with a relationship with anybody else.
I heard this from Lila who heard it from my ex , so I cannot swear on it completely. But something happened later that made me think yeah, that sounds about right. And then, later, I found out what was actually going on with Yash's girlfriend and Ryan, and the whole thing got so much worse, and also weirdly validating, but I'll get to that.