When he did start a fling with a girl in our dorm—a fact he kept to himself, because, ya know, we didn’t talk about intimacy, and also because he probably knew I was becoming a crazy person—I pieced the clues together myself (mutual hickeys spotted in the morning, disgustingly easy to notice) and demanded details, because that’s what bros do, right? They tell each other things! About girls! And what they like about girls! And why they like girls so much instead of boys! Friends tell each other everything, even things they don’t tell the girls they’re secretly hooking up with behind my back!

In perhaps my craziest move, at the depths of my obsession, I wrote an actual essay for an actual class I was taking on Shakespeare using actual evidence from Shakespeare’s plays to argue that friendships between dudes are stronger than sexual relationships between dudes and ladies. For real. I really did this. I used academia to convince myself, and the world, that two guys can have a totally normal and not-gay bond that completely transcends the connection between any two human beings ever on earth, and that it’s not weird, and that it’s totally not homosexual, because Shakespeare said so. (Craziness aside though, that’s a real goddamn theory, and it’s called “romantic friendship,” and Shakespeare was all over that shit. Look it up. Put down this book right now and go read As You Like It and then you’ll get what I’m talking about. They were totally in love with one another and it totally wasn’t gay. Even though there’s a bunch of theories today that are like “Nuh-uh! Gays didn’t exist yet, so they were totally gay, they just didn’t know it was called being gay yet!” But you know what? Fuck those theories. I stand by my essay. I got a B+ on that shit.)

At the culmination of my obsession, I did the thing that I am most embarrassed to admit and cringe most to remember, and before I say it, I implore you to find it in your heart to understand that it made perfect sense in my head at the time, and that the human brain does dumb things when it’s in love, even if it refuses to admit that love is what it’s feeling.