The Beginning of the End of Friendship — I Miss You.
~ Photo: credit in image ~
It was a warm day, the bags were packed, the car loaded with a heavy heart.
I knew it was never going to be the same. It was the beginning of the end of a life I would never know again. It was the ending of a chapter and the start of another. I could feel the distance between the two pages as miles and miles had grown between us.
The trip took a mere 280 miles, but stretched onward and upward of six months in the making. Days of not talking grew into weeks. Thick tension built walls around my heart, but I was screaming on the inside. Weeks built mountains between us so high I could no longer see a path to reconnect The path was overgrown with resentment, fear, and unbelievable sadness.
I drank it away as best I could, but nothing allowed me to escape the heartbreak I was experiencing.
We would stand in the same room night after night not saying a word. I longed to allow words to come pouring out of me, but the fear prevented it. Could I possibly step forward to be hurt any more than I already was? I couldn’t bare the thought of it. The feeling had all but consumed me. I spent hours listening to music in the dark smoking cigarette after cigarette watching the smoke float away, free, weightless, evaporating into the constricted air around me.
I knew a part of me was dying again and I couldn’t stop it. The little courage I had to face the pain was spent writing, writing, writing to myself. They were words no one would ever see until the day came where I knew I had to leave. The short note I left behind could not and did not even put a dent into the level of emotion I felt as I left, but it was all I had in me to give. The rest of my strength in the matter had puddled at my feet with nights and nights of tears. I could see no other way out so I slowly packed my belongings staring at the ruins of what had been a beautiful friendship.
The drive was something I would never forget. Insurmountable questions of how this could have happened again plagued me. “What was wrong with me?” I kept asking. The answers that floated up were not what I wanted to hear; that it was my fault, my cowardly way of sinking into the shadows instead of being forthright and expressing my heart. The words still hung in a sticky web inside me, never getting a chance to be released. I thought surely they would eventually strangle me. And sometimes they did as I choked down more tears being all alone in a new place escaping from the discomfort of my old life.
I knew this feeling well. It was as if I was standing on one side of a canyon and the bridge I had walked across to get to the other side had fallen. I looked longingly on toward the other side knowing, like usual, I didn’t have the skills to build another bridge. “It was better this way”, I kept telling myself. “You’ll heal, you’ll move on, you’ll get over it”.
Those sweet little comforting lies that allowed me to stay helpless and avoid attempts at repair. Yes, this is how it was supposed to go. I didn’t have the power to change the past so I gave in and gave up at all hopes of it being different. This is how it always went. It went well for awhile until I screwed it up again by my lack of communication and building of resentment until it completely spilled over into all interactions.
It didn’t cross my mind that there could be another way. It didn’t occur to me that I could break this cycle. It wouldn’t become a new way of being until years and years down the road, but that is another story. This story ends with a simple one paragraph email that has long since been lost in the twists and turns of life. It said something profoundly simple, “I miss you”.
It began slowly. I couldn’t believe it. This person that I had loved so much began to walk back into my life. I didn’t know how this process went. I was scared of messing it up again, but I knew I had to do something different. It meant too much to me to give up. And so I didn’t. I, we, started walking down a new path toward a different friendship.
A new chapter had once again begun and I felt so incredibly blessed. It was not like it was before, but it couldn’t be. The pain had changed me and it had changed her. We were more cautious, but yet more open. We realized the value of what we had both lost and we guarded this new venture with a strength only we knew the true depths of.
And so it began, a full circle journey through repair and away from the wreckage, another beginning of the end.
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Read more: BFF break-ups: 10 signs you might be ready to part ways.
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{More Open Society.}
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