We put some brownies in the oven and before they could finish baking, he had run to the store to get condoms, we made love, I climaxed for the first time during straight sex and we laughed and hugged and high fived each other. It was a rush of euphoria and comfort. We packed up our brownies and brought them back to his tour bus for the final call to leave the grounds. I hitched a ride to the next city, we had sex on the back of his bus while on a break from work, and in a field near a monument. It was an awakening like nothing I had ever felt.
Soon, I made a trip to visit him in LA, and he came back up with me to Toronto. We spent several months living in each other’s respective homes. I somehow managed to make it to work at 8:30am every day, despite staying up until 3am laughing, hanging out with all of our friends and having the most adventurous, silliest, safest, easiest sex imaginable.
It was a strange feeling. To love someone like they are in your family, to be sexually compatible with them, and yet know that you are not “in” love with them. We discussed that early on, before having sex on every surface of our living space. After some time, those lines blurred for me. They did not blur for him. He was able to separate being in love, from loving your friend and loving having sex with them. I was not.
This was all happening while I was awakening to my new career in comedy. Like a combination lock on a safe popping open, everything I had worked on leading up to this clicked into place. Sean encouraged my dreams and ideas and challenged my fears. I quit my stable-yet-boring job, he cashed in his plane ticket and I borrowed my mother’s car and drove down to Los Angeles with him to chase my dream like a fool. And it sort of worked. Except for the part where I couldn’t drive, but more on that later.
I have never spent so much time with another human so intimately, and been so gleeful. My brain started the logical connection that we should probably be together. Since, we were always together and it was awesome.
I went home on Christmas Day for the holidays and to tie up some loose ends. He was sleeping with someone else by New Year’s Eve.
I found out only after subletting my apartment and agreeing to come down to Los Angeles and help him with his fledgling play-writing project for two months. He claimed he didn’t realize that this would hurt me, and that it was just a hook-up and he hadn’t thought about how things would work when we were apart, or how it would affect us when we came back together.
His New Year’s Eve hookup turned into something more and as that progressed it became more awful for both of us. I was angry and hurt. He was confused and hurt. At the time when we most needed space from one another, we were thrust into living together. We worked torturously and tirelessly at keeping our friendship alive. We also hurled emotional grenades at one another and our expansive love turned to turmoil and resentment.
I left again for several weeks on a career sabbatical, and tacked on another two weeks just to keep away from him and enjoy my time in the city I was working in, far, far away from him. We drove back to Canada together as part of the loosely drawn plans we had made months earlier. I could barely back out of a driveway without having a panic attack, and we were both responsible for returning this car to my mother. Neither of us wanted to be there. We had moments of calm and resolution but they were peppered in a murky soup of rotten feelings. By the end of the drive we could not get away from one another quickly enough. If he hadn’t owed me money, I probably wouldn’t have seen him again.
Some months passed Sean was back in town for the same tour. I dragged my feet to go meet him and get my money. He handed it to me in front of the main entrance. A weight lifted; our obligation to one another, probably. We talked a little mostly about our friends, our roommates together. He missed them and so did they. He tentatively invited me in to hang out for a while; and then I returned a trepidatious olive branch by inviting him to come back to the house for dinner. Our friends were immediately beside themselves with excitement to see Sean. Their joy started to wash over us and we slowly continued to warm to one another. I took him out to my local comedy bar and introduced him to the friends he inspired me to make. I rested my head on his chest, and he wrapped his arm around me like a buddy. We shook all of it off. Everything. I had my friend back.