I do not believe in someday

how to break your own heart

Daniel and I were always very open with each other, easily, naturally, before we were romantically interested in each other. Both of us were dating other people when we met and there was a significant enough age gap between us that it didn't seem likely that we'd date when I was 19 and he was 26. Despite the lack of initial romantic interest and the sort of maturity gap I sensed between us, though, we gradually grew closer as friends at work in the photo lab where I developed photos and he sold cameras.

His girlfriend was in college up north, about a three-hour drive away, and they saw each other every couple weeks. They'd been together five years, which may as well have been a hundred to me. I was growing weary in my own relationship and I wasn't sure if I wanted to stay with my boyfriend. Unlike Daniel's relationship, mine with Brent had only been going on a few short months.

The thing with Brent had started out promising and that's around the time that Daniel and I began to grow innocently, but deeply, closer. We were working together a lot that season and we'd go out for smoke breaks together where we'd stay out far longer than was ever reasonable for a busy workday in retail, always lost in some intense conversation about life and art and esoteric spiritual concepts and love and the world. He talked to me a lot about his long and sometimes emotionally fraught relationship with his girlfriend.