She Told Me a Secret and I Lost a Friend

You can’t untell a secret

Harry and I were unlikely friends. I was a big-picture kind of person and he was fascinated by the details. But we bonded over coffee and cultural blunders.

Both twenty-something and far from home, we were looking for something we couldn’t find. Sometimes that was Wi-Fi and sometimes it was love.

We once walked down the lane that goes between a crumbling ruin and stately houses, with summer lovers making out on benches in the green space between. We looked at them with envy, but we knew that never would be us.

He and I were from two different worlds, but for a while, we shared the same hometown. I came to work with abandoned babies and he was teaching English to underprivileged kids. We met in a group for expats.

Being a first-year ex-pat isn’t easy. “It sucks to come and stay for such a short amount of time,” I said once. “You never find your place to land.”

“Yes, he said, “you either have to jump in with both feet and stay forever, or pack up and go home.”

So I stayed and he went. He was leaving to follow his dreams. I’d finally found love.

Instead of goodbye, I gave him a silly tourist key chain to open new doors in the places he’d go, and we both laughed.

We’d keep in touch, we said.

After he left, a mutual friend told me a secret that he’d kept and she’d found out.

Her words were casual but double-edged like Truth, handing me a different set of glasses to view the past: “Harry was into you, you know. He stayed a second term because he’d hoped you two might have a future together. But when he saw you’d found someone else, he went back home to England. He wanted you to be happy.”

Harry had been a safe place in uncertain waters. We could talk, laugh, and disagree about Nickelback. But, had he wanted us to be more? If so, he never told me. He’d never pushed for more than I could offer.

I don’t know why she thought I should know this secret, now. Maybe she just didn’t want to carry it alone.

Gaining knowledge is a blessing but also a curse. With knowledge comes pain. Like Eve and the apple, you can’t go back to blissful ignorance. You must leave the Garden of Innocence and there’s no way back in.

I looked down at the ring my husband had placed on my left finger just a few months ago. Harry was already gone.

What did she expect me to do with this new knowledge?

Things change. The road had diverged and Harry and I had made different choices. And maybe that is what she was trying to say.

I didn’t regret my choice. Harry and I both found love and happiness in different places of the same big world. And that’s the way it was meant to be. Calvin would say our course was predestined. Others would say it was fate.

But, once the secret was out, it brought a new awkwardness to my friendship with Harry that I hadn’t known before. Should I keep in touch, or let him move on? Our communication slowed until it fizzled to a final stop.

I found out the truth, but I lost a friend along the way. It’s the details that break you.

You can’t untell a secret.