message from the past

So I'm just having a great day here, having met up with friends in town, I'm walking home and thinking about nothing. I'm feeling great, no pressure, just completely relaxed. Yeah.
Then, my phone beeps and I get the message:

XXXXXX (15:38): R u here 4 pride?

Which sends me into a spin. I don't know what to do. This is a guy I'd set behind me, someone I'd thought I'd missed. I stuck my head out only to get it smashed by in like a turtle being attacked by a hammer. He was so nice in not being interested, which was bad enough, but then he's friends with a lot of my new friends too, which doesn't make it fun. It makes it shit.
I liked him so much that I thought it was worth that hassle, so when he said that, I thought that I should still be friends. I like(d?) him, so what's the point in being unfriendly? But at the same time I didn't want to be too friendly because that way I would see the good things about him and want to be able to have them. Luckily, he wasn't too good at just being friends so I saw bad sides of him too. I liked that really, it makes it easier to not be disappointed. But everyone has faults, has their own things that go wrong with them, errors in their behaviour and callice in their eyes from time to time.

It's hard though, to focus on the negative when the positive is so bright and it's shining through the black card that you're holding up to your eyes which simply reads:

NO.

And of course, the whole thing is so much more complicated than this, there are other people involved people who don't like me because I once wanted them, people who like me but I don't like them, people who don't like me becuase I don't want them. I hate relationship politics. Office politics I can do - ultimately, you can walk away from it with a clean head, but with politics of your heart, the strings are always there tugging away at your emotions, making you miss love.