AUTHOR: M. DATE: 10:52:00 PM ----- BODY:

It's been a year since I broke up with my best friend. I've mentioned this a couple of times here but haven't been quite ready to get into it. An anniversary seems like a good time to try to dump a little of it out of my brain and onto paper (computer). We met right after college, when we were both fellows in a do-good-and-make-a-living (sort of) kind of program. I don't have a sister, but thought if I had one I would have wanted it to be her. We got each other. She was quirky and made wierd observations about things. She called me on my shit. She stayed over at my house on the birthday right after I broke up with my last girlfriend, so I didn't have to sleep alone on my birthday. We travelled together and shared money and clothes like it was all communal property. For 6 years we were inseparable, and I thought we would play with each other's babies and watch each other's hair turn gray and know each other when we were very old. When I got married she stood with me under the chuppah, our wedding canopy, but we were already falling apart. Sometime when I wasn't noticing we started moving in different directions. It sound so obvious, doesn't it? - friends grow up and their lives take different paths and sometimes you stick together and sometimes you don't. But it's been as painful as it has been banal. We had our first blow-up about a month before I got married. It was the week before her sister's wedding, a 250-person black-tie affair complete with hysterical bride, hysterical mother-of-the-bride, sibling love and jealousy, my friend's intense desire for a partner, and all the baggage that goes along with missing a very important and beloved family member during a major life event. Makes sense that a person would have a blowout in the face of that kind of full-blown family drama - with her best friend's wedding on deck. At the time, though, I felt completely betrayed. I still do, as I think about it. Unlike anyone else I know, she failed, when under the gun, to express her real feelings in polite and tactful ways. She was downright nasty to me that day. I'm sure I didn't help. I'm sure I wasn't being very sympathetic. I'm sure I added fuel to the fire. I've gotten over the timing of the blowout, and I've gotten over feeling betrayed by how she felt, but I haven't gotten over how nasty a person can be to someone she loves. We moved on. No one apologized, but it was okay, or at least work-able. She and two other good friends took me to the Cape before the wedding, and we did okay. Mango-tinis helped. She was a rock star at the wedding. In every picture she's gorgeous and beaming, and I think it was real. That was the last good day - the middle of August. After that: she stopped returning phone calls. She flaked on plans more than she followed through. She dodged making plans, saying she was too busy in grad school, and then my sister-in-law would tell me about running into her at a party on the night she was too busy to make plans with me. I tried to talk to her about it, but then when she was on, she was on, and we would have a blast, and I would make up reasons not to talk to her about it - I was being oversensitive, she had a hard summer, she was really busy getting used to being a student again. This went on until January, and then I went to her house and delivered my Come-to-Jesus talk. She said some really painful things to me that night. Some of them were probably true, and some of them probably were meant just to be painful. I told her that I couldn't deal with being jerked around and made to feel so utterly unimportant, and told her that when she was ready to be my friend again, or at least to tell me what she needed from me, she should call me. And I left. Aside from a shallow-but-sweet conversation at a friend's wedding in April, we didn't talk until July - 7 months later. It wasn't a huffy, I'm-not-speaking-to-you kind of not talking. It was (at least on my end) more of an "I need a rest from the emotional roller coaster" and an "I need to hear that I still matter to her" silence. In July I called her. We made a date and sat on her front porch with glasses of ice water for three hours. It felt like no time had gone by. We caught each other up, and also talked for real. We both wanted to be friends. We both felt bad about everything that had happened, and but we talked about how it HAD been time for our friendship to change. We were going to try to figure out how to be friends again. I told her I still needed to know that I was important to her, and asked her to show me by calling me next, just so I could know that for five minutes at least she thought of me first. Five minutes never came, and now it's a year since we were friends. On good days I think: friends grow up. I was so blessed to have a friend like that for 6 years. In so many ways she was a model of how I want to be a friend to my friends. On my bad days I think: I can't believe I don't know her boyfriend's name. I can't believe I won't get to watch her graduate from Nurse Practitioner school. I can't believe I'm going to have a baby without her. And that fucking sucks. Of course this is all my side of the story. What's my role in this? I'm still trying to figure it out. I'm sure I had one, and I can make some educated guesses, but I know I'm still missing a lot. And maybe what I'm missing - or more precisely, the fact that I'm missing whatever I'm missing - is why she couldn't be my friend anymore. I hope someday I'll get a chance for her to tell me, or I'll be able figure it out myself. Miss her still.

-------- COMMENT-AUTHOR: Johnny COMMENT-DATE:7:44 AM COMMENT-BODY:Yup, been there. -------- COMMENT-AUTHOR: avonlea COMMENT-DATE:11:22 AM COMMENT-BODY:Marissa, I'm sorry for your loss of such a good friend, while I know it's not my place to say this - why not tell her how you feel? It sounds like there's been some one sidedness towards the end of your friendship, but you know, some people are just like that - passive/dependent/lazy - who knows? It doesn't necessarily mean they don't care. --------