I met him roughly a year ago on one of the last days of July in Vienna, in a little group of friends, the bestest of friends that found each other just to fulfil that role for a few days, to then never see each other again. Like ours, many little groups of bestest of friends formed at that hostel at Naschmarkt. We met on a Friday night that concluded a sunny day I spend sunbathing at Donauinsel. I remember hanging out at the lounge area on the ground floor of the hostel. He was sitting across from me, a coffee table holding glasses and empty beer cans between us. I sparked his interest by mentioning I used to study physics. I remember his face, his boldly daring grin, disguised by a deceptively harmless teddy bear appearance, which, little did I know at the time, would deceive me many times over in the following year. We tried to guess each other’s nationalities, you know, just like everyone always does when meeting people while they’re traveling. There was absolutely nothing special about us and yet, a year later, I somehow made him so special that he had the power to leave me heartbroken. At least, that’s his side of the story, that I did this to myself. I filled my own head with illusions about what we were or could be.

There are no illusions left now. He made sure of that.

Sunday, having stayed out till seven that morning to watch the sunrise with my bestest of friends, I had only slept a few hours when I woke up to his text. An hour later we met at the hostel lounge to have some breakfast. Two pieces of toast with scrambled eggs. Very yellow eggs. I told him about the last project I worked on. He was impressed. I enjoyed his praise then as much as I would throughout the following year. I remember resting my head on his shoulder because I was tired and because it was a good excuse to be close to him. After I finished one piece of toast with the very yellow scrambled eggs, we left. He paid, I let him. We walked around for a bit more, settled down on the terrace of a small cinema, drinking lemonade and making out like horny teenagers. We needed more privacy, so we looked for a hotel online. It rained, part of the way we ran there, part of the way we walked. Along the way we tried to find shelter from the rain and utilised every alley we passed to get just a little more physical before finally being able to completely let go in the privacy of an orange, yellow, brown tinted hotel room.

The next morning at the dawn of a new month, we bought coffee and croissants and ate them at MuseumsQuartier. We had the kind of freely flowing conversation one can easily have with someone they don’t expect to see again. After that we went our own ways, I to the Belvedere, he left the city for Bratislava, we wouldn’t be dragging out a good thing.

We did though, we dragged it all the way over Europe. I dragged it out over kilometres of scorching asphalt between Vienna and Eindhoven, between Eindhoven and Lisbon, until all its flesh was chaffed down to the bone. And now I’m left with a skeleton that won’t even haunt his closet, because he is able to absolve himself of any guilt by claiming that deep down I had always known what I was to him.

Just an interchangeable set of holes.

How could I have known that? After he told me that he was always happy to be there for me when I called him. After all the times he called me his friend. After sending each other hundreds of photos. After he told me he considered bringing me to his cousins wedding. After he called me up tipsy to tell me he had a crush on me. After a year of spending hours on the phone talking about nothing more than just life. What about that was supposed to make clear to me he never cared about my feelings, as he flat out told me a few days ago? How could I have known?