4.23

He leaned in, intense. "Why? Why did you cut ties?" His tone was hungry.
"She asked me to. Our relationship was too weird, too strange. And she couldn't handle that I was with someone else."
"That's crap."
"What?" I was taking a little longer to process this, maybe, or perhaps I just didn't want to.
"That's crap. You can't say that because it's not true, and you know it." He finally leaned back, raised his voice from the low growl of before. "She didn't deserve to be cut off just because your situation was strange. You were friends, after all."
"But I was dating someone, and--"
"And that precludes friendship? News to me." He finally looked away, taking his de-escalation in stages, backing off piecemeal from the intensity of his first question.
It's not fair, this accusation, I thought. He's reliving his own trauma through my situation right now. I knew that he had lost a good friend to a new relationship. That was different, but it really wasn't. The living room, enormous when I first walked in, felt claustrophobic. The atmosphere, once muggy, now cut like a knife.
He wasn't paying attention to me, anymore. He turned his attention to the plate of rice and curry, the naan and chai. He switched off, turned his attention to his food, and left me to spin my head around a new thought.

Am I a bad friend?