To [My EX-BFF] Part II
There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more than to never feel the breaking apart, my pictures of you...
This memory kept harassing me on social media last week. I’d get mad and sad and swipe it away as quickly as I could. Finally, when it was offered up for the third time, I decided to take a screenshot and face the feelings.
It makes me mad because I feel humiliated. There I was, thinking we were so close. I had flown across the country to celebrate you and this new love that made you so happy. I was there to love and support my best friend on this special day that she so badly yearned for. I was about to give you a heartfelt toast (that you requested because you’d always loved my writing). I thought you were so happy to have me there by your side.
But by the time this picture was taken, you had already started putting the nail in the coffin of our friendship months prior? Years? (I don’t think I’ll ever really know.) While I was laboring over the perfect words to stitch together in a toast to express how much I loved you, how much you meant to me, and how happy I was that you’d found true love, you were talking shit about me to your new best friend—your husband. This picture makes me feel like a clown. Humiliated. Because just two months after this post, you were stitching words together in a text to express how abused and disappointed you felt by our friendship.
Not even a phone call? Thirteen years of friendship cut off like a limb.
It makes me sad because I never thought you’d be so callous.
I’m lucky my therapist has helped me accept the fact that people will do whatever they want to do, and sometimes that includes leaving, and you just have to let them. She’s helped me with detachment (and for a person with “abandonment issues,” as you so ruthlessly pointed out in your roast of me over text), I think I’ve detached pretty well.
It makes me sad because I miss you. And missing you feels bad. My missing you made you feel burdened. And here I am…missing you. I can’t help it; it just happens, only this time, you don’t have to feel burdened by it.
A friend breakup and a significant other breakup aren’t that different as far as how painful and disorienting they are. Yet it’s normalized to cry and eat your feelings during one and to talk yourself into hating the person during the other. But it’s still the loss of a loved one. When someone dies, we don’t convince ourselves that they never cared about us and that they were just an asshole to begin with. That would be weird. Instead, we mourn. We mourn our losses for the dead and for our unrequited loves, but do we ever get to mourn a friendship? A part of you is still missing now, and it was their decision, not yours. I’d argue the loss of the person you thought saw and loved you to your core, the person you told your secrets to and showed all the parts of yourself through ugliness and laughter and joy and pain, is far more heart-wrenching.
But I’ve managed to take it in stride—for the most part.
I don’t think about you as much as I did a year ago.
I only think of you sometimes…
When I see colorful geometric jewelry or Frida Kahlo
When I see a “best friend” meme and find myself going to share it, but there’s no one to share THAT type of meme with anymore.
When I smell Jo Malone. That fragrance that is totally you, but who’s name I always forget.
When I’m performing for new friends or no one.
I think of you in May when our photos resurface.
We also went to Paris in May, remember?