Mortar

Shoulders hunched against the chill, we pressed together, side-to-side, as much for the reassuring solidity as for warmth. Our clouded breath made my first two fingers twitch in my pocket as if curled around a cigarette for the first time in months.

"You don't get it," she was saying as I reminisced about the feel of smoke tightening my chest, "it's not what we have in common that makes people close."

"No?" I asked, even though I knew she wasn't waiting for me to.

"No. Think about it. What sorts of things do you tell your friends that you don't tell anyone else?"

"I don't know. Hopes and fears, embarassing stories, stuff like that." I tried to blow a smoke ring with my smokeless breath. I never could really do it with smoke, anyway.

She shifted closer to me -- for warmth, or because her left foot was tired of holding all of her weight. "Why don't you tell that stuff to anyone else?"

I shifted onto my right foot, away from the soft curve that I felt even through her jacket. "Why would you tell embarassing things to somebody you don't trust?"

She turned and looked up at me, and the light from the bar window highlighted her slightly too-large nose and made her bloodshot eyes look dark and sunken. My chest felt like I'd just smoked the cigarette I'd been thinking about.

"Why would you tell those things to somebody you do trust?" she asked.

She turned away. I shoved my hands further into my pockets.

"I guess to prove you trust them," I said. "Or because you already know some stuff about them."

She looked back through the window, although you couldn't see the rest of our group through the crowd. "So we identify our friends by handing them the only knives that can really cut us, and they do the same to us."

"That's some Cold War shit right there, isn't it?"

"Mutually assured destruction." She nodded, still looking inside. "Hell of a model for friendship, I know."

"So when you find out someone isn't worth your trust," I gestured with my chin towards the bar, although she wasn't looking, "doesn't that change everything? Now you're at war or something?"

"It changes things, yeah." She spoke so softly I could barely hear. "But not like that. Real relationships are built on top of scars. Hundreds of little ones, a couple big ones, maybe -- but that's what they're built on. None of that other shit matters."

"Then why the hell am I out here trying to see if you're OK?"

She turned back to me, her face again oddly highlighted in the shifting glare. "You're here because I ripped your damn heart out a year ago and you still love me anyway, not because we both like football or Chinese food or hanging out with the same bunch of idiots."

I blinked hard against a sudden cold wind that made my eyes water, and shrugged, but I couldn't tell her she was wrong. Another tiny wound to add to the long list, but maybe she's right. Maybe relationships are built on a foundation of blood and broken feelings, and not on love or good intentions.

I put my arm around her shoulder -- maybe just for warmth -- and didn't answer when she leaned against me.