When my friend (who was actually a lover, but we never acknowledged it openly) left my office -- we were colleagues and met at office -- I missed him like hell. We had become extremely close to each other. He missed me too, but while I was open about it and wrote him several mails and SMSs saying how much I miss him (although, I did not talk about the 'love' aspect of our relationship, just that I missed him as a friend, terribly), he got upset and tried to keep a distance from me -- even when he was badly missing me. His love for me was overshadowed by his hatred for the fact that I had acknowledged my emotions for me, even as a friend. He was being paranoid because of the special nature of our relationship, because, another friend who had also left -- and we were also missing each other -- shared his emotions with me enthusiastically.

In fact, my 'lover' (we've not had any kind of sex, although, we did things like touching each other's crotch all the time, being physically close with each other and all that), started telling me indirectly, that he thinks I was 'gay' and that if he finds out a friend of his is gay, he will break that friendship. And he actually tried to break our friendship, and told two of our common friends that he thinks I'm gay.

I was hurt at this, when I came to know about it, and called him up to say that I wasn't, and that there's nothing in this world I hate more than the 'gay' word. I said, its an abuse for me, and I was not lying a bit.

It was only when he was convinced that I was not 'gay', that he removed his mental barriers from himself and started to be friends again. It took him more than a month of running away from me to do this.

He had started to avoid me -- avoid my calls, avoid my mails, avoid me on gtalk -- but now started to go out of the way to assure me that he doesn't want to avoid me.

In fact, for the first time, he wrote about his emotions on orkut... but not to me, to someone else. He didn't say he misses me, but said, he misses the office in general and how he appreciated a particular lady in my office who was much older than him.

I knew these were the emotions that were meant for me -- it was clear from his post. But he wouldn't give it to me. He needed to express those emotions, and so he disguised those emotions and sent it to a woman (he would never send it to a male friend), who could not misinterpret it as making advances because of the age difference, and because of the way he worded the mail.