We’re very good at almost

Kyla stelling

There were, of course, things Arthur had meant to say to Elle. A litany of ‘unsaids’ that had, over time, curled like burnt paper at the edges of his mind. But as anyone with a modicum of self-awareness will admit, intention is rarely an honest currency. And Arthur had spent the better part of a year accruing a wealth of intentions, none of which had been exchanged.

Elle, for her part, was a woman of convictions and half-buttoned oxford shirts, the sort of woman who took her iced coffee black and her intimacies complicated. She wore her contradictions like vintage denim—classic cut, faded in all the right places, and shaped more by wear than design. Arthur, meanwhile, was still somewhere inside a book he hadn’t yet written, narrating his thoughts in cadences that borrowed too heavily from other people’s prose.

Whatever had existed between them resisted easy definition. Calling it a relationship would have been generous, not to mention taxonomically irresponsible. It was a shimmer, a

subplot that refused to resolve, surviving across years and partners and changes of address. They had a habit of resurfacing in each other’s lives just when it was least appropriate. Elle had once said to Arthur, not-quite-smiling, “We’re very good at almost.” He nodded; not in agreement, exactly, but in recognition. He didn’t ask for elaboration. The ache had failed to vanish; it had simply become architectural, part of the way he was built now. A sentence he’d written in his head a hundred times and deleted each time before speaking.

It had started again, recently. The texts. Threads spun from digital cobwebs: a photo of her in a dress, a quip about a themed party, a GIF of a priest emerging in robes that Elle captioned as herself, followed by another of a woman stretching in a cemetery—Arthur. These things were, ostensibly, nothing. They were also everything. Because when Elle wrote, Arthur wrote back. And when she teased, he teased back. And when she asked, What do you want? He didn’t quite answer.

Not completely.

Not honestly.

He’d always loved the way she wrote desire sideways, through metaphor and mischief. One of those French New Wave heroines who only speaks in riddles and lipgloss. But love—albeit in dialects neither could ever fully translate—hadn’t been enough to keep things simple. It gestured at something grand, yes, but failed to contain the mess, the misreads, the emotional overflows. Whatever they’d had, it hadn’t lacked feeling. Just structure. Just timing. Just the necessary grammar.

And now they were here, on the other side of another rupture. Part of their cycle. An estrangement that smelled of shame and sounded like a slow dissolve. The kind that had tilted, quietly, with his engagement.

Arthur had recently proposed to his girlfriend, just as Elle had always known he would. Years ago, she’d asked if he would leave his girlfriend, and he hadn’t said no. He just drifted into speculation, into shared daydreams about a life they both knew would never arrive. It was refusal disguised as existential open-endedness, and Elle had seen it for what it was. She always did.

Elle was the first person he told about his intention to propose. There was no confrontation. No explosion of grief. In their ten-minute phone call, he offered that he wanted to be with Elle in whatever way was still possible. They were in a good place then. He wanted it to remain as such. “Romantic,” he’d called it, vaguely, as if he was naming a genre rather than describing a future.

She took the news the way she took most things—with a kind of elegant realism. Except something in her felt quietly rearranged. Not surprised, not shattered. Just heavy. As if she were losing him, or losing them, in a way that didn’t make sense to mourn—but still asked to be mourned. Elle knew how much this engagement mattered to him. And how final it sounded, even when hedged.

From Arthur, Elle needed something that registered. Marked and meaningful. Not flirtation. Not banter. Something deliberate. If she wasn’t set in his future, she needed to know she wouldn’t simply fade. That she was still visible to him, still named, still held.

And so she asked him to write her an email.

A letter.

Like the ones he used to send in the beginning—pages of lyricism and longing. Back when there was space for indulgence and feeling without consequence. When he could offer the fullness of his thoughts because nothing was fixed yet, and wanting her didn’t cost him anything. Not practical, not performative. Just composition that placed her at the center of something.

But to write to her would mean stirring what he’d fought to keep still.

And he couldn’t do that.

Not because he didn’t care. Only because in order to live the life he’d chosen—with his fiancée, with stability, with clean lines and no shadows—Arthur had to keep his heart in compartments. He couldn’t allow the ache to escape. Even the pang of what Elle still meant to him felt like a threat.

A letter would have made it undeniable.

A text could vanish. A call could blur. But to write it out—carefully, completely—made it solid. Spoken things had weight. Written ones, permanence. 

Underneath it all, he knew Elle deserved the part of him that wasn’t barbed with hesitation. She deserved the man who recognized her through language. Who made words feel like touch. But that man was more echo than presence now. She couldn’t reach him, and neither could he.

So, Arthur didn’t write.

And in not writing he broke trust far more intimate than silence.

His withholding, polished and cowardly, made Elle respond in a way that was eloquent, furious, unrelenting. This had become their pattern.

She asked.

He retreated.

And his quiet had calcified into the core of their undoing.

Months later, her birthday message to him had been warm, unguarded; ending with I love you, the way they’d tentatively started saying it again. He saw it. Heart-reacted. Nothing more. A muted ambivalence he hadn’t quite admitted was resentment; something about her not wanting to watch the short film he was making with his fiancée still clung to him. Petty and bruised. When she asked about it, he said a line about silence being subjective. When she pressed, he spiraled. It wasn’t elegant. His avoidance never was.

She had told him once, during a fight that left both of them wrung out and speechless, “You treat closeness like it costs you. Like I should be grateful for scraps. I’m not begging, Arthur. I’m just done pretending you're generous.”

Now they were trying this thing—friendship. Platonic in theory, peripherally flirtatious in execution. Elle was good at narrative design; she had proposed a once-a-week exchange of updates. Breezy things. Observations. The texture of their days. And it had mostly worked. Until Elle, ever the curator of subtext, asked if Arthur would give her a blank slate.

He ventured, I think the question I have is, if past context is blanked, what is left for the future?

She responded, I don’t think we’re blanking the past so much as choosing which parts we carry forward. That feels like a kindness to both of us. What’s left for the future? I’m not sure. But I still feel the thread—that connection that’s always been there—even if the shape of us is changing, more consciously now.

Arthur waited to reply. He told himself he was giving the message space, that thoughtful responses took time. But really, he just didn’t want to feel the weight of her words yet. He knew he’d respond later that afternoon, but not days later; a compromised latency that had become typical of him in recent months. There had been stretches, not long ago, when he’d let her messages sit unread for days. Not to punish her. Not consciously. But because opening them was inviting a gravitational force he wasn’t sure he could withstand. He claimed he could handle conflict—welcomed it, even—yet the reality was murkier. He avoided when he felt cornered, deflected when things got too sharp.

Lately, though, his replies had come faster; sometimes within minutes, sometimes hours, if he was busy or pretending to be. It was part of a new equilibrium. He was engaged now, folded into a life that felt like a self-sustaining universe, the kind that forms around you once you commit to permanence in a way the world can recognize. And with that choice came a kind of protective barrier: Elle’s emotional volatility no longer reached him with the same force. He could respond now, casually, calmly. So long as she kept things soft, manageable, just outside the center of impact.

Elle, once the axis of his emotional weather system, had been recast as someone he could correspond with from a higher, drier altitude. It was easier now. Lighter. Or so he told himself.

It was choreography they both knew by heart: Arthur offered just enough presence to stay close, though never enough to feel solid. It was the varietal of inconsistency that made Elle feel both chosen and avoided, depending on the hour. And Arthur knew that.

Elle, for her part, didn’t do well with silence. Not his kind, anyway. The kind that felt intentional, curated, an ellipsis held just long enough to make her question her own tone. He’d seen it before, the way uncertainty made her more expressive, not less. The not-knowing created space she couldn’t help but fill.

While he lingered in his distance, she sent him her usual GIFs—offbeat, wry, disarmingly accurate. Always from Fleabag. The visual metaphors did what script couldn’t: they let her confess I still care and I’m still watching without pressing her face up to the glass.

She sent a GIF of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character gently, yet hesitantly, touching the paw of a guinea pig her friend was holding out.

Guinea pig = our friendship, Elle wrote. Figuring it out doesn’t mean launching into some heady think tank project. It just means petting it, holding it, feeding it carrots and lettuce. Maybe one day you’ll even find it cute.

Arthur smiled when he saw it. Of course she’d find a way to articulate what he couldn’t without sounding like she was trying. Guinea pig = our friendship. It was playful, and gentle, and—infuriatingly—right. It didn’t need to be theorized, just tended to. And that idea, so simple and obvious, made a wire tighten in his chest. There was a resonance in her tone—written, visual, vocal—that always bent him out of shape. She wielded vulnerability as a blade, silken at the edge, sharpened to cut.

What would it mean, really, to be her friend?

Could he sit through stories of her husband with equanimity? Could he answer her questions about Max Minghella—her dream man—without letting jealousy sprout like mold in the dark corners of his gut? Could he offer her the version of himself she deserved—unobligated, unguarded—without imploding?

He wasn’t sure.

But he also knew that when she sent a video of herself singing, he watched it twice. And when she joked about her boobs typing random texts, he laughed in that real, involuntary way. And when she said she still felt the thread between them, he felt it too. Tugging. Always.

Her earlier phrase—a kindness to both of us—stuck. It made him feel, briefly, like someone worth forgiving.

He heart-reacted, of course. That safe, antiseptic placeholder. Then he added: I mean, yes, this is the question I’m wondering :)

It was vague. Evasive. True. Or at least true enough to send.

When she followed up, So, you’re open to figuring it out with me? Slowly but surely? He felt the tug again. And this time, he let himself answer plainly:

Yes, I’m open.

What came was a flurry of texts in the rhythm they used to find without trying. A grin emoji. A one-liner. A pause. Then came the Fleabag GIF—Waller-Bridge cracking open a Bible and inhaling it, as if theology could be taken in through the nose. It was absurd, obviously. Funny, yes.

Also—uncomfortably precise.

It was Elle at her best: irreverent and affectionate, silly and sincere, all in the same breath. Not revering the object so much as testing the feeling behind it. The suggestion was clear, even if she’d never say it in words: I don’t need doctrine, I don’t want intensity masquerading as clarity. I just want to be here with you, in this strange in-between, and let it matter. Even if it’s a little ridiculous. She wasn’t asking for a treatise. She didn’t want theory. She wanted presence.

Small, tactile gestures.

Carrots and lettuce.

A willingness to hold the tiny animal in both hands and not flinch.

Maybe even call it cute.