I’ve always had trouble letting go of friends. Friends are important to me, maybe the most important thing to me. I’ve made a lot of amazing friends throughout my life, fast and strong relationships built on trust and love, which you just know are going to last forever. But as beautiful as a friendship may be, time and distance have a way of wearing these things away. I’ve come to accept this. Not like it or even be OK with it, but accept it. I accept that there are some people who were once powerful forces in my life, and have since faded into the background. I still love these people, there are no hard feelings or blame, nobody at fault for anything other than living their lives. I still think of these people often, and many I talk to whenever I can, but I accept that its possible they will never again be to me what they once were. It’s sad, but I learned to accept it. Once this happened, I thought I had officially come to peace with all the costs of growing up. I was wrong.
The week of my high school graduation, there was another rite of passage awaiting me, I lost a friend. And not the amicable fading away I had experienced so many times before, this was different. A big argument, cold shoulders, heated words, so many tears and finally, a sinking feeling in my chest as I realized I had just seen my best friend for the last time.
There was no closure or hug goodbye, no promises to reunite again one day. I couldn’t comprehend it. We had built a friendship out of years of laughter, trust and love. We had prided ourselves on the lack of drama and pettiness that we saw in other friendships. We’d helped each other through the hardest times and made memories together during the best. How could something so pure and strong crumble so quickly?
I didn’t accept it, I couldn’t. I cried and raged and sent messages into a void, never knowing if they were being acknowledged or even received. I thought of my friend often, each time the thought hitting me like a blow to the chest. Other lost friendships, I could look back on with nostalgia and bittersweet happiness. But when I thought of this one, I felt only anger and sadness and frustration. This was the one loose end I’d failed to tie up, a wound I thought would fester for the rest of my life.
Yet on I went. I got a job, I started college, I made new friends and spent time with old ones. I kept moving, learning and growing, and slowly, very slowly, the bitterness began to subside. One day, recently, I was looking through old photos and came across one of me and this friend. To my surprise, I smiled. I smiled at the memory and felt flooded with the same feelings of nostalgia and goodwill that I feel when thinking of other old friends. The pain is still there, I think it always will be to some extent, but it’s softened.
When something ends badly, at first, all you feel is the pain and anger associated with it. The bad ending becomes a wall, blocking your memory of everything that happened before. But once those emotions begin to subside, everything on the other side of that wall reappears untouched. Just because a friendship ends painfully, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. All the laughter, love and support is still there in your memories.
It’s OK to miss people, and it’s normal to wish you still had them in your life. But anger and other negative emotions have a way of clouding things, and it's important to keep those feelings from becoming a permanent taint on otherwise good memories. No matter how something ends, it should never take away from the fact that it happened.
