Sing It if You Know It

You've all heard it. It's a familiar song, sang far and wide in many different languages. In French, it's "laissez-nous être juste des amis." In Spanish, it's "déjenos solamente ser amigos." In German, the language of my heritage, it's "lassen Sie uns, gerade Freunde sein." In English, as I heard it on Friday, it's said "let's just be friends."
I've never had the privilege of using "let's just be friends." The only guy I've ever dumped was operating on borrowed time anyway. His personality was as bland as overcooked broccoli. I didn't want to be his friend. I didn't even want to see him in person to dump him, so I did it over the phone. It's not easy to have the conversation that, as nice or inoffensive as someone may be, that you have no interest in seeing movies or spending time with them. You don't want to explain it, because the language centers in your brain decide to quit working and you always say something stupid. In my case as the dumper and not the dumped, I said "I want someone more, um, entertaining than you." For a writer, you think I could have managed a word that didn't make the guy feel like he had to put on a rubber nose and cram himself into a little car to win my affection. But it had been said and I never heard from him again.
So a year went by. There were men who piqued my interest, but none who fit the bill as more entertaining. There were drunken kisses, sober kisses, drunken groping, but nothing that seemed promising in the morning when I woke up alone, desperate for a burrito. Then I threw a party.
Maybe it's because I was surrounded by my own friends that I was comfortable enough to attract the attention of a man. Maybe it was the fact that my boobs were perilously close to being exposed in the camisole I was wearing. I don't know what it was, but by the end of the evening I was making out. With a guy. He didn't object to sleeping in my lumpy futon since my friends were camped out on my bedroom floor. He even stayed once he'd gone outside and seen that he'd been ticketed for parking overnight in Brookline. I didn't wake up alone. He didn't run away from my cotton-mouth morning breath and bedhead. Things seemed promising. I wish I could have enjoyed it more but my head was pounding from riding the Silver Bullet into Hangoverville.
He asked for my number and after a few days he called. I was ecstatic. He was my midnight kiss on New Year's Eve, he made dates, we went to Florida. I liked him. But things went south quickly once we came north. He was aloof, not affectionate and I knew what was happening even though I stubbornly pretended that I didn't. So after the ultimate evening of romance (dinner at the Old Country Buffet and a trip to Target) I asked him up to my apartment. Instead of turning the car off, he put on the parking break, turned down the radio, and said, "I hate having this conversation."
Sing it! Sing it loudly, because you know it. You've used it or you've heard it. It's the dirge of the dating world, you know the lyrics like you know the National Anthem or Hey Jude. Sing it in pain, sing it in joy, sing it!:
Let's just be friends.
You're a great person, but
Let's just be friends.
And it sucked. It's never fun to hear "I like you, but I don't like you like you." Even as an independent woman who is happy with her neuroses, foul mouth and tummy pudge I can't help but think, "What if I changed, somehow? What if I did some sit-ups, bought some nice clothes, had a little couch time with a mental health professional? Then would you reconsider and come upstairs?"
As Gary Newman sang about cars and how safe he feels in them, I crossed my arms and leaned my legs against the door, listening to the man in the car explain how he liked me but didn't, the language areas of his brain nearly audible in their work trying to find the right words to explain how he felt as delicately as possible. I kept in mind that he didn't want to tell me this as much as I didn't want to hear it. I watched couples walking to the T, preened for their dates, holding hands in the cold January night. I realized that he wanted to be in a couple as much as me, to hold hands and really be into someone, but it wouldn't be me holding his hand anymore, and I'd have to be okay with that.
He talked for a while longer, but my eyes were heavy and I wanted to go to bed. He pulled up to a break in the snowdrifts outside my apartment. I hugged him reluctantly, thinking of how I'd kissed him every time I'd left the car before. As I walked by the small parking lot for the liquor store at the end of my street, a guy in one of the cars rolled down the window and yelled, "Hey hottie!" It was simultaneously encouraging and depressing, just like the phrase "let's just be friends."