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Look, it’s not like he’s in love.
That’s what Tom’s been telling himself for… oh, maybe ten years now.
He’s not a complete idiot. He knows his days are instantly better when a certain friend of his happens to drop by. He knows he’s spent more than a little time daydreaming about said friend’s brown eyes and muscles and stupidly charming lensless glasses.
He knows he’s attracted. A younger person might call it a “crush,” or “liking” someone. Tom doesn’t use words like that anymore.
And yeah, he knows he likes talking to Elliot better than anyone else on the planet. He always has. It just feels natural in a way he can’t quite name. Feels like some part of himself, some deep dark corner of his psyche that usually goes unseen, gets acknowledged when they talk, in a way that’s been profoundly healing for Tom.
But it’s not like he’s in love or anything. He said those words to himself over and over for so long that he hardly even thought to question them anymore.
Which is why it was such a shock to him when the quarantine hit and suddenly, poof, Elliot was out of his life, and Tom realized he wasn’t the slightest bit prepared for it. They kept in touch, sure, for necessary work obligations and those cute little Zoom check-ins everyone did in the early quarantine days. That first era of COVID, the time for handwashing PSAs and sourdough starters and clapping for healthcare workers, felt sort of almost okay. Tom still had hope then: we’ll probably go back to normal one day.
But then time passed, and then more time passed, and their conversations all but disappeared. The optimistic denial of early 2020 grew weak in the face of extended silence; it started wearing thinner and thinner every day. Eventually it ran completely out, and without understanding what was happening to him, Tom was thrown right into the other four stages of relationship grief.
Bargaining hit him first. He started obsessively rewatching his own videos, scrolling through their old text threads, and sometimes just lying awake at night running through memories. He tried to gather data about the situation, as if figuring out what was happening could somehow stop it. He noticed the first time the two of them went a full month with no contact; he counted the frequency of Elliot’s one-word texts; he mentally cataloged every life transition the two of them had faced together, along with the time it had taken them after each one to settle into normalcy again.
And they’d gone through a hell of a lot of changes over the years. There had been coworkers hired and fired, brief fights that eventually sputtered out, a month here or there where the two of them didn’t see each other at all. Tom made it through all of those without having a mental breakdown, and hell, Elliot stuck by him through all of it too. If they made it through this much, surely a little quarantine couldn’t kill them.
But then more time passed, it just wouldn’t fucking stop, and the memories of past positive experiences seemed to lose their comforting effect. The clock kept ticking and the distance between them only grew. It just all felt so confusing and so blindingly unfair.
That’s when the anger hit.
To his credit, Tom never took it out on Charlie. He’d wait until she left, maybe to meet up with her parents or take the dogs for a walk, before letting the rage take over. He was furious, burning with an anger hotter than any he’d ever felt before, at the injustice of his situation. It was like the universe was laughing right at him specifically: “What, did you think you would ever find a normal life? A group of friends who wouldn’t outgrow you? Pathetic.”
He hit things sometimes. Walls, the mattress, himself. Sometimes over and over until he bruised; sometimes just once, one big thwack to let out a bit of the pressure built up inside of him. It worked at all maybe a third of the time, and even then the relief that came with it was never enough to make up for the shame. He would spend hours afterward just soaking in his own self-hatred, humiliated at his inability to shut down these immature, unwanted fucking feelings.
Eventually Charlie would come home, the moment would pass, and Tom would tuck his distress away for a little while longer.
Depression hit next, after the anger started to pass. It didn’t come with the self-harm urges, but depression was still the most painful phase of all because it made no fucking sense because Tom wasn’t even in love! He never actively fantasized about Elliot, he never wanted to date him, he never even had a proper “oh shit, I must be into you” moment, so why the everloving fuck did it undeniably feel like he was going through the nastiest breakup of his life right now?
It was like every breakup he’d ever been through collapsed into one, and it knocked the breath out of him so hard that some days he couldn’t even bear to pick up his phone. He lived in his bed for weeks; if it weren’t for Charlie’s patient support, he might’ve just rotted there.
During that time, Tom’s brain became an endless loop of self-hatred. He was a useless person who deserved to be abandoned, he was pathetic for ever expecting what he felt for Elliot to be reciprocated in any capacity, and didn’t he know Elliot was better off without him anyway? How could he be so selfish, wanting Elliot’s attention when it could be given instead to his girlfriend or his buddies or literally anyone other than the worthless sack of shit wasting entire months on doing nothing but feeling sorry for himself?
Drinking didn’t help. Eating didn’t help. He just missed his friend, missed him so fucking badly, and there was nothing he could do but wait for the wound to scab over.
And it didn’t for the first six months. It didn’t for a year after that either. But at a certain point, once they started to be able to see each other again under limited circumstances, once they started texting more often to plan shoots, once Tom let himself hope again that some semblance of the friendship was still intact…
And he was right about that, thank God. The friendship they have is still at least mostly intact; it just feels a bit different. For a few months now they’ve been filming together, chatting sometimes, even flirting for the camera every now and then. From an objective standpoint, their relationship appears to be more or less okay, but Tom is still very much not, which is why he’s just now starting to force himself to recognize that actually… actually, maybe he was a little bit in love with Elliot. Just a little. In his own way.
And maybe he isn’t anymore, at least not like he was before.
It’s strange, mourning a relationship that never happened. It sort of feels like the thing that died, the thing Tom’s been obsessively grieving over the past couple of years, was actually a part of himself. Some little corner of his heart was set aside just for Elliot, the part that lit up so faithfully whenever they were in a room together. That little piece of himself had meant so much more to Tom than he had realized. It really was, if he’s honest with himself, the reason he used to wake up in the morning, and it just isn’t that anymore. It seems to have morphed into a normal amount of enjoying each other’s company, plus a rare flicker of manageable attraction in certain circumstances.
Isn’t that just Tom’s luck? He thought he had a friend when he really had a love, and now that he’s actually noticed the love, he really does just have a friend.
He still grieves a little bit every now and then, whenever something reminds him of those secret feelings of the past. Some days it’s when Elliot does something awful like chuckling and meeting Tom’s eyes with a smirk and Tom feels a weak little twitch in the pit of his stomach where the butterflies used to be; other days it comes out of nowhere, a random barrage of insecure thoughts dragging him back down to the bad place with no warning. But those moments always pass and for the most part, he’s accepted it. Something wonderful that used to be a part of his life is gone now, and that’s really alright. He still has his friends, a wonderful girlfriend, a relatively steady career…
This isn’t quite going to kill him, but Jesus Christ has it aged him. The past three years carried so much growth and pain, they may as well have been a decade. He found his first gray hair the other day.
But depression and grief aren’t entirely new to Tom and he’s learned by now that there’s no way out except through, so that’s what his new focus has been. He’s waking up every day, brushing his teeth, forcing himself to work, and trying to actually enjoy some of it when he can. And actually, he’s written some good scripts lately. Possibly even his best work yet. Life without the constant Elliot-induced dopamine rushes is quieter and a bit more boring, but it is a much more conducive environment for actually getting shit done. That was a benefit to all this that he hadn’t expected.
He’s picking up the pieces of the part of him that broke, and even though he so desperately wanted to for so long, he isn’t trying to put them back together anymore. There’s no use trying to rescue the dead. Instead he’s collecting those pieces in a little box, closing it up, and storing it in the back of his mind for later, some theoretical future where he has the time and strength to face what really happened and start actually processing his shit.
There are so many questions he can’t answer right now without risking slipping back into that soul-crushing depression: questions about what Elliot’s experience of the whole thing has been, what this means for his relationship with Charlie, what it means for his own sexuality… And he wants to know those things, he really does. He still wants to find actual peace. He just can’t allow himself to go there yet.
But he’s moving in that direction, slowly but surely. All he has to do is what he’s always done: keep on keeping on, even when it hurts, one damned day at a time.