I think it is always good to reflect on passings and endings. And as I have finally come to the ending of a friendship that I had been desperately holding onto, it is time to reflect on that relationship and let it go. In a few weeks I will make the final cut, and ritually “bury” the past forever, so now I am in the last stage where i have accepted its dead, gone, cold and flatlined and that it happened a long long time ago.
And so I need to look at it for what it was, the good and the bad, and see what lessons I learned from this friendship; what can I take with me and move forward with, what do I leave behind, what changes can I make to avoid losing touch with other people in the same way? These are all critically important in the process of accepting this loss.
I know it seems very silly, to write about a friendship that *I* ended years ago, and moreso to write as if there were any valid hope of things being revived. Until this point there was still hope, because we had been through this before. But the first time we went through it we didn’t have the same issues that we did this time. This time there were entanglements and promises, shared pains were lessened, and hurts were caused, things shared that should not have been shared…
I live with the knowledge that this is the second time I sought him out as a friend, and this time he (rightly) soundly rejected my seeking. Its the death, not unlike the death that would have occurred if either of us had left this world. At this point the person who was my friend is gone, and the “me” that was his friend is gone, and we are strangers from this day forth.
Still… there were lessons to be learned for me:
I have learned the bounds of the friendships that exist between people and within time. Friendship, even the ones that feel the strongest, crumble when they are not tended and treated carefully.
Having him in my life openned me up to the use of words as a daily tool. It was partly through our use of email (even though we lived in the same city and talked to each other in person every day) exchanges to examine ourselves, the world, and the situations in which we lived, that I grew to use the words that I had within myself for my own explorations and healing. Although the “letters” we sent are now gone (STBX having destroyed my computer files in order to humilate me) I do fondly remember openning up my email box and finding a muli-page exegesis on whatever he was reading or exploring or opinion altering rants on the state of affairs of his professors. He was the first person to respond to my verbosity as if it were a good, rather than a tedious, thing. He may not be the ONLY one, but he was the very first to encourage the wordiness and the writing as normal and purposeful.
He introduced me to the world of math, with a patience no one had with me before or after. He called bullshit on me when it was necessary, and took a sideways approach when that was needed. He was the one that truely got me through calculus… not to mention getting me through accounting, computers decision making, and statistics. I don’t know if I was ever able to assist him in the ways he assisted me.
He was there the time I found out that I was pregnant, and through the terror of that moment that changed my life. He was there while I worried about dealing with STBX’s anger at the timing, and was the person who called my mother to support me when I needed her.
And he was the person I turned to too often, the response to an email that always came, the solace in knowing that somewhere, out there, there was a friend connected to me by all these common threads and whom I had known would respond to an email… until the day he didn’t.
And I know that I needed it. I needed to face rejection, the way I had to make him face rejection, even though there was nothing I wanted less than to lose him from my life. I know that I didn’t want to lose him, but I could not keep my life the way it was, and I could not keep him in my life or stay in HIS life. He needed to be let go, he needed to move on because I knew that due to my situation I was a toxic prescence in my life. And I have learned to watch how I am with my friends, because of that situation. I am more careful of my relating to others, because now I am more afraid of openning myself up and hurting others than I used to be.
He forced me to grow up, more than anything else. There were things that I had no concept of, that I was placed face to face with through our friendship. I learned a lot about my strengths, although belatedly, and my weaknesses. I learned things that I like about myself and I faced darkness within myself.
But it was not all good, and that is something to remember this far out. Neither of us was perfect, we started our friendship as children on our own for the first time in our lives, and we parted as jaded adults who knew too much about the world and the mistakes of our modern society. And it that process of growing up that caused the choking, grasping, toxins that killed the friendship like a pernicious weed.
I realize that, now, as clearly as is possible.
By Yule I will have let go of the sadness of the loss of my friend. He is no longer out there… and we are dead to each other
As it should be…
Nothing really to say, but it seemed wrong not to acknowledge this.