cheers to eleven years
Yesterday, I agreed to meet with an old friend. She has been my friend for more than a decade, as we met in the 7th grade and have been close ever since. We were in this close-knit circle of six girls, who for the better half of my life and my formative years, I might as well have considered my own sisters.
But leading up to yesterday afternoon, I felt like I didn’t really know her. Something happened in December last year that led to me being hurt and terribly disappointed with her and one of our other friends in the group. I have written about it a lot of times, how I want to memorize what happened, how things went down, but I guess it is painful enough and though I have been feeling ready to move on, I am still healing from it and it's still something that is difficult to share.
I once read that advice where if you’re the friend that always starts the conversation in the chat, always the one that makes the invites, plans and organizes the outings and all that - it is imperative that you do not stop doing this, that you do not stop reaching out, even if met with the uncontrollable forces of schedule conflicts and their inability to show up.
I was that friend in the group for the last few years and I think it was an okay advice. As women vying for success in different fields, exploring, I understood that these things just happen in adulthood. I did not mind it. I like to think that when I love, I do not count. That it doesn’t really matter to me that I was always there but some others weren’t. So, with that setup, when one of my friends says they can’t come, I take it for what it is and say it’s okay then forget about it, rise and repeat.
That is until in December, I had this thing at my house. I made the invites and reminded them months before. It was that important to me and yet, this friend could not come and show up for me. She said to me she had stuff to do for school, and I said okay then moved on. I think it would be so much easier to leave it at that. But -
Later on, I found out my other friend who also could not come to my thing had to meet with her cousin at a club. Then the friend who had stuff to do for school wants to accompany her. And so in the end they were not there because because because. At this point their reasons have tumbled about in my head so many times and it would not change the fact that they went out for the night instead of going to my thing. It had been a hot minute since I had cried like that with my other friends when we realized we were left for the club. And some more realizations that their absence had been a recurring theme in our friendship throughout the years.
Come morning after their night out and our friend group’s collective breakdown, other things have happened that just bred a strain of toxicity in our friendship. Apparently, in the midst of their partying, a huge fight broke out between the two of them. This led to the following months not having this issue smoothed out and the rest of the group's grievances put aside because they could not fix their own shit.
Half a year has passed and in those months apologies were made, but no assurances or changed behavior. I’ve poured my whole heart out trying to paint my pain to them and telling them why their absence has hurt me and that it had reopened a lot of the other times they were not there. I told her that yesterday, but she already knew it in January, but even then nothing has changed. I don’t think she was even really sorry, but I believed that she was truly hurt by the falling out with our other friend.
In the end, what stayed with me was a culmination of this enormous pain of not being chosen, over and over again. Like fact being proven each time and I did not even realize it. And is there really anything you can do? I got tired. If I was not sad I was wallowing in self-pity. It was no longer good for my heart.
Yesterday, maybe I had high expectations that she would apologize and say she’d make it up to us or to me. But that did not happen ~ instead she said she was also hurt, and cited something that happened in high school that has scarred her, her own reference of why she acted that way. In a lot of ways, it made little sense and I had little energy to argue, to ask her to choose me or show up for me the next time.
I feel so awful for old me; why she ever felt she needed to demand other people’s time and companionship. I have treasured all our 11 years together and no matter how much I love her as my friend - she is my friend forever - I am choosing myself and my peace for now.
Maybe we can just try again next time, may it be in the next decade or the next lifetime ~