英语美文｜纽约爱情故事：友情还是爱情？

Stories of love, lose and redemption.

关于爱，失去和救赎的故事

2004 年，《纽约时报》开设了一个名为 Modern Love 的情感专栏，让读者围绕 love 这个主题来讲述自己与情感有关的经历。15 年，无数来自不同背景，有着不同经历的读者们，怀着巨大的热情和坦诚，倾诉着自己精彩人生中的闪光片段，讲述他们爱的经历和体验。 

在每日阅读中，我们挑选了其中的一些故事，这些故事简短丰富，文笔流畅，难度适中，对英文学习来说，是极好的阅读素材。

让我们从一段长达十年的“友情”开始吧——

Friends Without Benefits（上）

Hannah Selinger

I MET him when I was 22 and squandering a year of my life (and liver quality) working as a waitress in my Massachusetts（美国马赛诸萨州） hometown. I was an Ivy League（常春藤盟校） graduate who’d always had a plan, and suddenly I had no plan. All my life I had been regimented, disciplined and very, very good, but I didn’t want to be that girl in the front row raising my hand with the right answers anymore. So I traded in my sharpened pencils for an apron and a pair of clogs, and started serving tables five nights a week at a local pub.

It took a lot less time than anyone expected for me to shed my preppy college ways and adopt the freewheeling lifestyle of restaurant work. The guys in the kitchen labeled me “Columbia” in homage to my now distant-seeming academic career, my Massachusetts accent returned with a vengeance and I learned to negotiate the distance between a postwork six-pack of Bud Light and the crooked, mile-long drive home, as all local drunks inevitably do.

图片来自电影《一天》

He had worked at the pub through high school, then returned when, one semester short of graduating from college, he dropped out. He was two years older than me and possessed the kind of natural good looks that made me nervous. I was surprised when he wanted to be friends and opened up his life to me on a boozy and Parliament-fueled night in his apartment, but I was not surprised that someone as good-looking as he was chose not to kiss me when the evening ended.

We carried on a knotted-up friendship for two years. We shared a bed many times but never touched. He pulled me into his world only to discard me any night a pretty young thing showed up for the taking, knowing, I think, that I had fallen in love with him and that I was only waiting for him to realize I had been there all along.

For those years, we practically lived together. Our friendship was of the riotous, fight-it-out variety, so much so that people often said we were in love. If he was in love with me, he didn’t exactly show it, spiriting off one night to sleep with my best friend behind my back, and asking my roommate to be his date to a wedding we both attended.

But I was consumed by him. I had forgotten how to breathe on my own. We circled each other constantly, picking up the messes, piecing our friendship and whatever else remained back together. He knew I loved him. I slept with his cousin to get his attention, and afterward he looked at me in the sly way of men who know they have you under their thumb, who know you can do nothing to resist.

“Good for you,” he said.

That could have been our mantra: “Good for you.” 

   图片来自电影《一天》

Years later, he would confess to having loved me all along. But while I stood waiting for him to happen to me, he was always looking for the next best thing. I apparently  made too good of a friend for him to justify anything more significant, which my young brain could interpret only as a criticism.

To me it felt like a matter of time. He would come around. I pushed hard against the girls he brought home. I slept on his couch and in the morning shouldered angrily past blond college students who did not understand my rage. 

Who was I, anyway? A friend? A roommate? A drunken neighbor with nowhere to sleep? Did even I know who I was?

- TO BE CONTINUED -

图片来源：美剧《摩登情爱》

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