Work Text:
A week.
It’d been a week since they last spoke. A week since the last read message. A week since Jeremy started ignoring him. And yet, despite the swirling mass of emotions currently at home in him, Michael couldn’t get mad.
It started with large gaps in replies, which he quickly, unworriedly marked off as him being busy. It was college, Jesus, he was going to get busy. Then, the inability to call, despite Michael offering and each and every opportunity, going out of his way to make himself available. After that, the short, uninvolved conversations. Just like the calls, he took every opportunity to text him. He sent memes that had been in his camera roll for months. Sent photos of the mess that was rehearsals. Told him anything that happened which he could scrounge together into a vaguely interesting story.
No matter what he tried, nothing helped.
He still doesn’t know why , which was the worst part of it. If Jeremy just said, hey, yeah, I don’t feel like talking to you right now, he could deal. Michael liked to think of himself as (sometimes overly) understanding. Whatever it was, if someone told him straight up, he’d support them and do all he could to make them comfortable. Maybe that was a flaw? Placing other’s feelings above his own? It shouldn’t be. Caring for his friends over himself should get him more than unread texts and online statuses.
But, here he was, refreshing his Instagram feed for the umpteenth time as he contemplated what exactly he’d done . He couldn’t think of anything he was completely sure of. Did Jeremy feel the relationship was unfulfilling? They were moving kinda slow; their pet names consisted of ‘bro’ and ‘buddy’ and other variations, and yeah, they were a little strange, but they felt special to him. Would he have minded being called babe or something along those lines every so often? No, not at all. But he didn’t think the nature of their relationship would so drastically affect Jeremy.
Was he too clingy? He did message Jeremy whenever he could. That could easily get to be annoying. But, then again, they were dating before this all happened. Yeah, it had only been a few weeks since they decided to, but still, you’d imagine one would know that getting into a relationship would mean a bit more of a need to interact, especially a long-distance one, since the two were at different colleges across the country from each other.
So, maybe it wasn’t the clinginess. Maybe he just moved on. Really, Michael was lucky to be friends with him as long as he had, even more so have a relationship with him, so it’d be understandable. Plus, the added distance probably made things worse. It was probably easy for him to lose interest in him when there were other people who were both significantly better than him and significantly closer.
Whatever the reasoning, all Michael knew was that it sucked, big time. He’d been so eager to accept the original explanation, that Jeremy was busy and just needed some space, that he didn’t want for Michael to keep putting in all that effort without Jeremy being able to return it, that he didn’t want it to be one-sided in terms of communication, that maybe it’d be better for them to take a break for now, seeing where things go, that he still wanted to stay friends, of course, he loved having him in his life.
All of that was perfect to Michael.
Obviously, he still wanted to be in a relationship. He wasn’t sure yet, but he really, really felt like he could love Jeremy one day. Move past the crush, past the ‘liking’, onto those deep feelings that make it easy to stick it out through the rough patches in life. The feelings that’d help him hold out until he could haul ass over to New York, go to his dorm, and kiss him. It was the first time he felt like there was that potential for something more than just a crush.
He supposed Jeremy didn’t feel the same.
After they came to that conclusion, Michael wasn’t quite sure what the nature of their relationship was. Did he still talk to him? Leave him alone for now? Say good morning/night as usual? The more he thought, the more he realized how little their conversation fixed.
Even though he really had no clue what was going on between them at the moment, he went about business as usual. He talked about a mishap with one of his teachers, eliciting a concerned reply, three hours later. Michael responded with yet another bad thing that happened just thirty minutes prior just to be met with a final ‘fuck you’ from the universe. The message went unread. He pushed on, asked him some questions he had. No reply. Told him he was tired, he was going to bed, even though it was 7:25 P.M., 10:25 Jeremy’s time. No reply. Next day, no good morning message, just something about what had been happening. It may be hard for him to contact Jeremy from here on out. That was the last read message. He became less like himself, typing with none of the usual punctuation and emotion. Explained that it wouldn’t really affect their ability to talk. Radio silence. Asked if he could call sometime. Nothing. Sent a message consisting only of ‘night’ in order to get his emotions across. He didn’t even open it.
Michael decided to stop trying.
After two days of seeing Jeremy not being too ‘busy’ to post drawings on Instagram, or to be active on Tumblr, or to be online on Discord, but too busy to even read his texts, he came to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe , he wasn’t actually busy. After this realization, Michael wrote out a message explaining how he was feeling. Just like the other messages, it went unread.
The next two days, he dropped a couple of texts elaborating.
The third day, he sent a final message, telling him, among other things, that he was glad to have met him and hoped he had a good life. He didn’t read it.
His contact name was changed from ‘jere’ followed by a series of heart emojis to ‘Jeremy’.
Did he come to a conclusion too quickly? Maybe. Should he have considered more options? Maybe. Was he wrong to decide that a 14 year long friendship should end so easily? Ask Jeremy that. Could the SQUIP be back, shutting Michael out again? He doubted it. The SQUIP wouldn’t have explained it, wouldn’t have let Jeremy send those little replies after the discussion, or have it taper off so slowly. Plus, he made sure that if someone in his dorm saw him acting out of the ordinary to give him some Red. The request was met with quizzical stares, but they didn’t ask any questions.
It felt dumb, how he somehow didn’t even experience a change in his view of Jeremy. He knew that the moment he decided to talk to him again, if he decided to, he’d immediately let him in. If he wanted to talk about it, Michael would let him. If he wanted to act like it never did, Michael would forget about it. The fact that the worst consequence that would come from this is Michael taking a little bit longer to trust Jeremy as much as he used to was ridiculous, and he knew it. He didn’t realize how desperate he was to just talk to him until he didn’t have the ability to.
What was that quote, from Mockingbird ? “Until I feared I’d lose it, I never loved to read. One doesn’t love breathing.” He remembered reading that, freshman year. It felt significant to him; he wasn’t quite sure why, but he wrote it down on a sticky note and put it up on his corkboard. It was still there, up on that board, and it was ever present in his life.
He thought about the quote pretty frequently. How much it related to the current situation. Even with the SQUIP, he could at least see Jeremy, making the way he was ignored a bit easier. He was still there, just not with Michael. It put how much he cared into perspective, made him realize that inkling of love inside him.
Now that they couldn’t even seen each other? Now that Michael’s one source of contact with Jeremy was through liking his art posts or looking at his story? Everything was hyper-focused. All the feelings he had were put under a microscope, analyzed, and had a report written up about them because, god damn , this kid was in deep.
After graduation, it got difficult. Every one of his friends were going to different colleges, or no college, or going directly into the workforce. No one was even in the same state as he was. But, they made it work.
For a bit.
People got busy, people made new friends, people drifted away, just dropping a text every once in a while. Nonetheless, Michael knew that wouldn’t happen to himself and Jeremy. It couldn’t , they were too good of friends. And then, they were boyfriends.
And now? He didn’t know what they were.
If you had asked Michael, or Jeremy, or anyone who knew the two of them, if they thought they’d ever stop being friends a year ago, they’d laugh. Obviously, 14 years of bonding wasn’t just going to go away that quickly. It wasn’t even something they humored. Hell , they made it through the SQUIP just fine(ish), anything else was a piece of cake. It was a two-player game, after all, they’d make it through, together.
But, maybe it wasn’t a two-player game.
As he walked around campus, his immediate response to anything interesting was to type out a quick text to Jeremy, only to be faced with the situation once more. He missed him, above all else. Missed how it felt to always have someone there to text if anything mildly interesting or amusing or just plain mundane happened. Someone who would call him until 11 o'clock, that made him feel comfortable enough to let his walls down, that he could have conversations about anything and everything .
Michael supposed it made sense.
It was going too well.
Only a matter of time before the universe intervened.
He didn’t know what he did to piss someone up there off, but fuck if they weren’t making it obvious that he did.
The worst part of this, if you could find a ‘worst part’ of this shitty situation, was that he didn’t know, and supposed he never would know, what he did wrong, where he messed up.
Was blaming himself for this a bit too self-deprecating? Maybe. But it was much easier to find faults in himself before Jeremy. He was riddled with them, a huge mass of faults and mistakes bundled up into the form of a human. Jeremy wasn’t perfect , but he was definitely better than Michael.
Whatever happened to have brought this about, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Life moves on, yeah, but it tended to do so without Michael.
So, he continued to mull over every little mistake he made. He kept going to classes, kept talking to friends, kept functioning as normal, but every time Jeremy was asked about by his classmates (all of whom had heard of him at least once, since Michael couldn’t shut up), he froze. He remembered everything that happened, and the process of moving on started once more.
Every time his phone started vibrating, he perked up, thought that it was Jeremy wanting to talk again. It wasn’t even the right pattern, the one he added specifically for him.
He tried ignoring it, tried just crying it out, tried to get angry, no matter how fake it was, tried talking about it, tried to find someone else to like. He didn’t. It was like no matter what he did, he couldn’t move on.
Life had a habit of giving him something amazing just to take it away, of giving him a glimpse of how amazing life could be and proceed to cover his eyes once more, taunting him.
The whole event could be very eloquently summarized by Michael’s sole journal entry from April 17th, 2016:
This sucks .