Writers 
Brian was someone I met when I came into school and he helped me settle in academically. Somehow, we became close, too close actually, but never actually intimate. This situation bothered me sometimes. He was someone developed a huge crush on.
There was a point when I stopped trying to figure out what Brian and I were.
Not because I had figured it out, it was quite the opposite, I was just simply tired.
One minute, we could talk for hours and in the next, he would disappear so completely that I would start wondering whether the previous conversation happened in another lifetime.
After a while, he would come back, slide into my DM casually. Like nothing had happened.
“How far?”, he would say.
How far? Was that it?
You disappeared for days and came back with how far?
I would stare at the message, already annoyed.
But the funny thing is that I would always reply, annoyance had never been enough to stop me from replying to him.
Sometimes our conversations were completely normal.
School.
Random jokes.
Things happening around us.
Then, somehow, one sentence would change the entire atmosphere. He would say something that made me pause.
I would respond.
He would tease me.
I would tease him back.
And suddenly we were both pretending that we did not notice the little shift in the conversation.
That was the annoying part. Nothing was ever clear enough. If he was completely uninterested, he had a strange way of showing it. If he was interested, he had an even stranger way of showing that too.
There were days when I thought to myself, okay, maybe there's actually something here.
Then he would do something that made me think, "never mind."
So I stopped trying to solve the mystery. At least, I tried at first.
One evening, he called and we talked casually. Nothing particularly romantic happened. There was no confession, no dramatic conversation, just the usual talking about everything and nothing in particular.
At some point, he said something that made me laugh. Then he laughed because I laughed.
And for a moment, everything felt so easy. Then the call ended.
I looked at my phone. And there it was again, that annoying little feeling.
Maybe love or simply just attachment. The kind that makes someone's absence noticeable.
The kind that makes you recognize their typing style.
The kind that makes you know when “I'm busy” actually means “I'm busy” and when it means “I actually don't feel like talking.”
The kind that makes you notice when their energy changes.
And maybe that's where I got myself into trouble.
Because once you start paying that much attention to someone, you begin to look for meanings everywhere.
A short reply becomes a statement.
A long call becomes evidence.
A missed call becomes a question.
A random joke becomes something you replay later.
You start reading between lines that may not even have anything written between them.
And eventually, you realize you're doing detective work on a person who has not even asked you to investigate.
So I decided to stop.
If he wanted to talk, we would talk.
If he disappeared, I would let him disappear.
If he came back with his usual,“How far?”, I would decide whether I actually wanted to answer.
It sounded simple but it wasn't.
Because the funny thing about having almost-relationships or situationships is that they are difficult to leave precisely because there's nothing concrete to leave.
No breakup, official beginning or clear ending.
Just two people who keep finding their way back into each other's conversations.
And maybe that's what made Brian different.
He was not exactly a chapter, he was more like a sentence I kept returning to because I wasn't sure whether I would understood it correctly later.
Sometimes I still do not know what we were.
And that was the whole point. Maybe not every connection is supposed to come with a name.
Some people simply enter your life, become familiar, irritate you, make you laugh, disappear, return and somehow remain important without either of you ever deciding what that means.
And perhaps the most honest thing I could say about Brian is this:
I stopped trying to figure out what we were.
But I never quite stopped wondering.