Give it a rest

We'd been best friends since college; she was a magical, sweet, strange pixie of a girl, and I adored her. Reconnected and in the same area after years of hit or miss connections, something was going awry. We didn't fit as well, I felt choked and silent in her presence.

I'd been trying to get in touch with her for weeks -emails, voice messages - with no response. We'd last spoken on the phone when I'd asked if she could stop by my house on her way home from work, rather than our original plan for me to drive a county over to hers. She'd declined; "I just want to be home."

"Me, too," I thought. I didn't give in to the insistant nag of people pleasing. I was working on being more assertive, this was a reasonable request, we'd just get together later.

But for weeks: nothing.

The day my father is due for major surgery, I check my email to distract myself from the nauseating mantra "He could die, he could die, he could die."

She's written me a message. What serendipity, I stupidly think. A nudge of support from the magical universe delivered through her just when I most need it!

I have to reread the email a few times to get the point: she's ending our friendship. In an email. Said I wasn't there for her during a depression she'd experienced a few years back; she's not sure what she wanted from me but she didn't get what she needed; she'd tried to let it go but couldn't; she knew I was dealing with my own depression but...

I shouldn't have written back right then. Shouldn't have apologized. Shouldn't have groveled. Shouldn't have said I'd be there if she changed her mind.

We'd been growing apart; we'd grown apart. The friendship was already comatose when she mercilessly killed it.

I should have said:

"I feel there is no room for me to be myself within the rigid guidelines we developed for our roles in this friendship when it started. I see now that you're not able to allow this to grow and change. I wish you the best. Goodbye."

Better than saying what I truly felt, on that emotional day: "You BITCH. You dump because I didn't provide some service you decided is required of me to deserve your friendship? And that I should have done so without your having to ask for what you needed of me? You dump me because I dare asked you to drive 10 minutes out of your way rather than have me drive an hour out of mine? (that interaction seemed emblematic of our entire friendship) You dump me, on a day my father could die? You selfish BITCH!"

I cried, my mom offered some sage words of advice before we head to the hospital to watch and worry and wait. I cried for what? For the people we think we'll never lose but we lose anyway, for the person I'd been for so many years, for the person I was fighting to become.

And now, at least five years later, I'm seething. I haven't let it go, haven't grown up, can't give it a rest. I bitterly hope I somehow hurt her as badly, disappointed her as deeply as she did me. I'm electrified by the memory of it, I craft scathing speeches meant to flay skin from bone, I think of finding her address to send a last note of bile and rage.

Crying yet for the person I still am, for the person I fight to become.