A sunset is not supposed to be sinister. But as we sat on a blanket on the beach in Dennis Port looking up at a giant orange quivering on the horizon, I didn’t experience awe or wonder or transcendence. Only alarm. The waning sun reinforced in my drained soul what the heavens already knew: Humans were just another species. If Jo destroyed me, the cosmos would not know or care.

Jo was not alarmed, however, having forgotten, as he tended to do, the most recent expression of his detestation for me. No, instead, he sat transfixed, no doubt bursting with spiritual stirrings inside.

There was any number of friends I could have taken on my few days at the beach, none of whom would have put me through the dicer this holiday had been. Others would have been content with idle talk and unremarkable walks on the beach and dinners out. Not Jo, who had interpreted every glance from me, every wince or yawn, as complicit evidence that I was not present for him and therefore not the caliber of friend he deserved.

I knew this would not be the first of Jo’s lost friendships. His pattern was simple in its brutality: Make a fast friend, put everything into him until he was lulled into comfort, believing the two of them were as intimate as non-lovers could be. Then toss the unsuspecting victim into a centrifuge and wait for him to turn to mush.

With us, the end had begun with blueberry muffins. Saturday mornings he began surprising me by baking. At first, I didn’t sense danger, even when he would bring up several times during the day how kind he had been to bake. Too soon, though, the smell of browning muffins woke me up with dread. Any false step of mine that followed our eating of them—and that staircase was rickety—sent him into a torrent of accusations about how I didn’t appreciate all the things he did for me. Muffins, elaborate meals, doing my laundry. Only once, and early on in our co-habitation, did I point out during one of these freefalls of indictment that I’d never asked him to do anything for me, certainly not hang my laundry on the line. And because his reaction was so ferocious, I really thought he was going to punch me, or at least faint. He had a skill— impressive, I later decided, and one which had taken me some time to decode—of twisting words I said in defense and trying to strangle me with them.

When he was worn out, when he had snipped as much of my spirit as he could, he would then, amazingly, declare that our bond was stronger than ever, tested as it had been by this trial by fire. Jo didn’t see his attacks as such, but rather as relationship-strengtheners. Perhaps he fancied himself like a new stepdad who roughs up a soft boy to prepare him for the fierce world. When this beach trip of agony was over, Jo would be certain he and I were tighter than ever.

There was no evidence for him ever to draw this conclusion, as every new bestie Jo initiated this way eventually scrammed. Jo told me this himself, that they disappeared from his life suddenly. Finding himself alone, he would exclaim again and again in open-mouthed wonder.

It was my turn to bolt like the others. This was our last trip together, the last of everything. Trampled as I was, I was clear-headed enough about that. As far as I was concerned, the friendship, which he examined as if it were a budget report, was now bankrupt.

Our therapy session together a few weeks earlier might have changed this predictable direction, in the best of all worlds. Generally, friends who are not lovers don’t go to counseling together, but Jo had insisted, had believed it would help me understand that conflict—constant and unremitting as it was—was healthy, toning. Seeing nothing but more bedlam ahead if I didn’t, I’d complied.

Sylvie—I think that was her name—asked us why we were in couples therapy, two friends, gay, but no romantic or sexual interest in each other. Jo went first, as he would, reciting his enduring theme about how he did everything for me, emotionally and otherwise, and so why was it so much to ask that I not sigh with impatience when he launched into a story about a childhood hurt at eleven o’clock at night? Or that I not look away during confrontations, since breaking eye contact meant I wasn’t being present? Or that I not wince when he explained that I must be brainless for not knowing that I was the reason he was upset with me? I was why we had spent so many long nights working out the problems in our relationship.

When it was my turn to address Sylvie, I felt like a very weak defendant. Jo had made a strong case against me, and most of what he’d said had been true. But I said out loud what I hadn’t dared say to him alone. I told her that these all-nighters were basically Jo screaming at me for imagined infractions that he based largely on facial expression and tics of mine I wasn’t always aware of. Jo had defined these tirades as arguments, I said, but they were always initiated by him, never by me. They would begin with a sinisterly reasonable request: Would I please not leave dishes in the drainer to dry, but dry them and put them away, for example. I knew better

than to argue—logical as my argument would have been that the drainer was there for that purpose, or that he left dishes in it until they collected dust. I would agree immediately, maybe even say that I’d been thoughtless to leave my dishes that way. But the night was young, and he would want to know why he had to ask in the first place. It regressed from there, if moving to a shrill crescendo was evidence of regression. As the months went on, I said, the accusations became more preposterous, with me trying to explain how I’d not intended any disrespect or betrayal by sneezing or throat-clearing or excessive blinking when he was deep into telling how his father had thrown darts at him or dumped a plate of Dinty Moore stew over his mother’s head.

I told Sylvie that if I managed to explain to him how one of his accusations against me was illogical, he would act like I hadn’t said anything at all, just proceed to my next sin. If, when he started a fight, I tried to derail him by, say, immediately admitting my grievous faults, Jo shrieked that I was patronizing him. I felt disoriented after one of these frequent sessions, I said, like a POW who can’t appease his captor even with a false confession. And finally, I said that I was sure my only real fault in each conflict was that I placated him by participating at all, by in any way encouraging Jo to believe he hadn’t pulled the whole fight out of his ass, and for agreeing in any way that we had worked through one of our problems by this process.

When I was done speaking, the tiny office was as silent as an attic. I waited for Sylvie to validate Jo’s doctrine. He was her patient, after all. Surely she would lecture me about how to be a better friend, how to understand the depth of Jo’s need for real emotional connection. To my amazement—muted as it had to be—the therapy session at that point turned thrilling. Sylvie barely needed those few silent moments. She went into a long, pointed evaluation of Jo’s behavior, which she called destructive and not a little self-indulgent. She became the aggressive stepdad then, scolding Jo for not practicing the strategies they had agreed on for dealing with his Borderline Personality Disorder. It was true, she said, that I had nothing to do with any of these so-called fights. Jo was inventing reasons to attack someone, and I was only part of it for being present. She said that in the future, I should not engage with Jo when he was in such a state, that I should remove myself from the premises when the first grenade was launched. Definitely, I must make no attempt to mollify him. I should even consider moving out if Jo’s treatment of me didn’t improve, and immediately. It was Jo’s responsibility, she said, to know and to work on his own issues, and to take his medications. She then demanded to know if he was indeed still taking them, to which he mumbled an unconvincing yes.

The session was followed by a letup at home, which, though icy, was a great relief.

Neither of us did much talking. Slowly Jo warmed to me again, and he was loose, comfortable. We reeled back to something like our pre-trauma era. Maybe Sylvie’s spell had worked, and this wasn’t the end of our friendship. Even if we were coasting, I let myself lean back into the peace. I even agreed to this trip to the Cape.

Jo waited until we were on the Mass Pike before making the incision. Quick as an alligator who had waited long enough, Jo wanted to settle the Sylvie score. We hadn’t gotten to the first exit and Sylvie was already in pieces. She was a hack, he said, an amateur, probably unlicensed. She didn’t know how to listen. And just because she was on my side didn’t mean I wasn’t an asshole. It just meant she took sides, a dick move, unprofessional. Don’t assume

there’s nothing wrong with you, he told me. Don’t think for a second that you’re not the one who’s mentally ill. The friendship, he said, was in deep jeopardy.

It wasn’t in jeopardy. It was snuffed. Any other driver would have turned the car around and headed back. But I wasn’t upset or shocked or feeling anything a person felt after a successful ambush. I was sorrowful. He owned the house in Albany, so I would be the one moving out. Despite its owner, the house was very comfortable, and leaving wasn’t going to be easy for me with my usual lack of money. After Jo, I was going to have to find yet another new place to live, using up the thousand dollars I’d managed to save by living with him to find a new stranger to reckon with.

It’s not like I hadn’t guessed it was going to end miserably. Moving into his place had been the most imprudent choice I’d ever made, in a life full of them. Long before I’d settled into one of his spare bedrooms, he’d been sporadically confrontational, producing counterfeit resentments that had to be talked through. But I had always been able to go home afterward, give him time to settle. He and I would even joke about the outburst later.

My sadness, my mourning, was heavy. Endings, I guess. Early on, he really had been the best friend a person could ask for, generous with his time, and especially with his money. And patient with my constant penury. I was mourning the Jo who had offered domesticity I’d never had with my own family, and certainly not with any of my crash-and-burn boyfriends. The Jo who’d never really existed had encouraged me and spent freely for my comforts. He had, without

hesitating, established the boundary of our friendship as never lovers. “You may as well be a lesbian,” he once told me. “The love is purer that way.”

So there was grief. And shame. I felt none of Sylvie’s vindication now. I was thirty-eight with still no career in sight, no prospects even. I was going to be once again searching out a roommate like an unpopular college boy, and taking advantage of friends who actually did know how to navigate in capitalism. But I had my pride, shredded as it might have been: Whatever conflicts that were to come with my next roomie, they would not be steeped in friendship because we were not going to be friends. I knew that much, to at last insist on a rigid, non-porous margin this next time around, and every time after.

For now, Jo and I were on the beach one last time together, having watched the sunset teeter on the horizon, then sink.

“Want to get a lobster roll?” he asked, the sun fully gone. It was an indulgence we’d always taken in the past, before we’d lived together, when going to the beach for a few days was not captivity and domination. He was breathing in the sea air with an unreserved smile, happy as a boy at camp, evidently unconcerned that an hour earlier he’d concluded that I was moronic and disloyal.

I smiled too. This was the imposter I’d once loved. We would not have another moment like this, and we were going to get lobster rolls.

– Peter Marino

Author’s Note: While there’s plenty of representation in, say, literature and music regarding failing romantic relationships, there’s not a lot of comfort for those facing a dying friendship and the concurrent, raw self-examination.