Remember when I poured my heart out to you earlier today? I told you about that song – the one from my collection I had not heard for years. I told you how, hearing it again, I was torn asunder. I just about broke in front of you as I said it. The wave was upon me, dense and overwhelming. I was so vulnerable in that instant; because the truth was still raw. Still beating.

I willingly confessed. Chancing upon that song had transported me to the side of the two women I loved the most, both of whom I let down. I told you how I had tried to be a lighthouse for them – listener, supporter, champion, ally – but that I now saw a less flattering truth; that I was little more than a useless bystander. That I had acted out of vanity and neediness. That my rescuer conceit had made things worse for both of them.

Your response? Mollify, minimise, trot out the confected reductions of polite explanation. You stepped through your catalogue of celebrity-approved pop-psychology, your vapid middle class advice. “Oh no,” you intoned, so eager to insert your pallid, suburbanite rightness. “You know it wasn’t really like that.” Cue your alternative read.

Aren’t you the wise one? You’d know, wouldn’t you? Because you weren’t there. No, but you had a ready stock of glib platitude, of oh-so-handy understanding.

Listening to you, I was concussed. Speechless. Do you remember how I blinked, shook my head, sighed? And yet still you blabbed, pushed, bull at a gate, pontificating.

Maybe, sooner, later, your less emotional interpretation will prove more accurate. That is not my issue here. Nor is it your crashing lack of sensitivity, your tone-deaf timing, your oafish inability to allow the moment its oxygen. To simply sit with me in that minute, and just listen.

Now, hours later, my punch-drunk senses have returned, and it seems clear. So, here’s a little pop-psych for you to absorb. Why were you so quick to placate me, to paper over the cuts, to crush my experience into your neat little box? Could it be that my feelings – wild and forthright as they were – made you uncomfortable? Maybe I was too irrational, too passionate, too naked. You wanted my feelings where you could contain them, explain them.

Illiterate, gutless. That’s what I’m thinking now. Afraid of my feelings because you are terrified of your own. Using the levers of the well-meaning friend to knock the edges off experience. To tame.

I will find it hard to tell you anything of import ever again, or to trust you with anything other than the trivial or dry. You lost me today. I shared something vivid with you and you swept it away, replacing it with limp and bloodless calculation.

I realise this sounds harsh – yet it is no more violent or disrespectful than your pusillanimous attempts to hose down my reality.

Sorry, friendship just about over. Thanks for the fucking advice.