It's got what it takes, so tell me why can't this be love?

Of course, my brother didn't love Michaela, and so she was inevitably and unceremoniously dumped, over the phone. He told me casually when I asked what they were doing on a coming weekend. He just said "Michaela? Oh, we're not going out anymore". Of course I rang her to find out what was going on, and she told me the whole story. What little there was to tell. It was too hard for him, she explained, to have someone taking up so much of his time. A phone call a day? Sometimes for as long as ten minutes! I couldn't understand it. But I did love her, and he didn't. I would have re-laid the telephone wires from our place to hers if I needed to, just to hear her voice every day.

And this was the thing, she was pretty, but she wasn't the most beautiful girl I knew, her voice was nice (damning with faint praise), but probably unremarkable, she was fun to be around, but not the life of the party, smart, but not super intelligent. There was no reason for it, but then, as I have learned since, there is no reason for falling in love with anyone. It just happens, and it happens apparently at random. Sometimes while already in a relationship with someone, sometimes with someone else who is, and often with someone who doesn't respond in kind.

That was clearly the case with Michaela. It was wrong, anyway, she said, when I even suggested we could continue to see each other, he was my brother after all. And I can't deny that. I don't want to think, even now, about them being together. I'd seen them kissing enough, but I can't envisage them actually having sex, though I know it must be true that they did, and often. But my mind won't linger on the idea, and it never could picture that particular image.

The difficulty with teenage groups is their tribal nature. Sure, we all had best friends, but the group was solid, if amorphous. We looked out for each other doing things I would now think twice about as an adult. Crashing parties in suburbs on the opposite side of the city, sneaking into pubs with drug dealers, junkies, and assorted small scale criminals in parts of town the police tried to avoid. We were a crew, we were a gang, and as part of that gang, we stuck together, even after breakups. There was a kind of inevitable incestuousness within the tribe, as fleeting relationships formed and dissipated within weeks or months, until it seems we had all done the rounds with each other's exes. Except me, of course. I was an observer. I was removed from the activity while being at the heart of the action. As always, recording the history of the tribe, only to recount it later, in private, for my own peace of mind.

And in this case, Michaela was a part of my life. For a while. And she, as part of the procession of girls and ladies and women who did so in my life, told me she just wanted to be my friend, and having done so faded from view, receding into fog like a car in the winter night, tail lights fading into the murk. Then she was gone. And I was back on my own. I avoided my brother for some time, and he avoided the rest of us, avoided Michaela, until she had slipped loose the ties that bound her to us, her friend ending her alliance with whomever had dragged them both in from their parentally-approved private-school parties to our archetypal teen-rebellion lifestyle.

She also said something else that I have heard more than once in my life. A semantic distraction to relieve responsibility for breaking a heart. A pedantic interpretation of an overused word, which discarded all responsibility for the devastation the wordplay always inflicts on its recipient. "Oh, but I love you, I'm just not in love with you". There is no why, there is only a deep wound that is vulnerable to being opened at any time in future with that magic incantation. But you can't argue logically, you can't convince someone in words to love you. This despite the simplicity of convincing another that you don't with a simple phrase.