There is very little left in my room that reminds me of you. It strikes me particularly that there was so little to remove in the first place; your material significance in my life wasn’t nearly as large as I thought it was. Looking back, I always overvalued you, it seems.
I do not believe you when you say you still like me. I do not believe you because I know you don’t mean it, not the way I mean it when I ask the question. I mean “Do you still care about me?” not “Do you still sometimes think I’m funny?” I mean “Does spending time with me make you happy? Does talking to me make you forget to worry for a few minutes?” not “Does my hair look nice this way?” You do not care about me, and I’m sure that had I asked the question I wanted you to answer that’s what you’d’ve said. But instead I let you tell one last white lie.
I don’t need another shallow friendship in my life. Any friendship takes time, and I am indeed short on time (though not nearly to the extent you tell yourself I am.) I cannot afford to waste my time maintaining cordial relations with someone who does not actually care about me. Lasting romantic relationships I may never know much about, but lasting friendships I do. When you decided I was not important enough to you to invest time and energy into our relationship, you made a decision about our relationship in its entirety, regardless of its label.
I do not and cannot believe that you value our friendship enough to maintain it. You have already written me completely out of your life; there is no void that our friendship could fill. I am no longer part of your support system. You lack any desire to be a part of mine. I no longer make you happy. I have not seen you smile in months.
Once I think you did care about me. Once I think I did matter in your life, and it is those memories that once gave me hope and now give me regret. But I will not miss those last two weeks. I will not miss slowly realizing that I am now less important than an econ midterm, less valuable than being overly prepared for a discussion section.
It’s remarkable how many friends I’ve found I have at Stanford since I lost the best friend I thought I had here. Somewhere between finding people who skipped the Super Bowl to talk to me, people who sent me e-mails to check up on me, people who bought me food, and people who paid more attention to me than to the professor lecturing, I realized that there are more people here that care about me than I thought. So much as it hurts to find that someone I care about immensely has no further need of me (and it does hurt), it helps to know that losing one friend does not leave me alone.
So, Ed, though I will miss you every day, we cannot be friends. I wish you all the best.