Friendship is a great and wondrous thing. Good friends can turn bad days into good days(or at least less bad ones), forge memories, and walk with you on the path to happiness and success. And the best friends in life understand you on an intuitive level. They love you in a way that a romantic partner can't and hold a piece of your heart.
But friendships, as good as they are, aren't always permanent fixtures in your life. Whether the friendship ends with a bang or a whimper, there will be times when people dear to you will exit your life.
Whether you want them to or not.
My best friend Tony has been having lots of feelings for a person lately, not all of them good. Him, our friend Daisy*, and I have a texting group chat. He approached the two of us in the group chat last week, saying he was having issues.
Tony isn't known for bringing up his problems. It's probably not a healthy thing, but everyone has an unhealthy coping method or two. So approached with this, Daisy and I didn't know how to react. We tried helping him get to the root of the problem.
And then we didn't hear from him for five days.
When he did deign to speak to us on Friday, he told us off for psychoanalyzing him and not automatically knowing(as his best friends) what his real issue was. If presented with these perfectly valid criticisms at the time, we could've stopped doing that immediately. But instead, he decided to fucking disappear.
And maybe it's just because I've recently had other people go on radio silence for no discernible reason(which he knows), but I... didn't take this well. I responded in like tones, pointing out the same things I have here. Daisy, being Daisy, apologized and validated his feelings. That's probably what I should've done. Now we're in a place where I won't apologize for anything because I felt abandoned, and he won't apologize because he doesn't think he did anything wrong.
We haven't spoken since then. I don't feel his absence as keenly as I thought I might. I'm not sure if that's the anger sustaining me, or if we've just drifted apart far enough that this distance doesn't feel unbearable. The truth is, it's been getting more difficult having a best friend in a different stage of life. Tony still lives at home, doesn't drive, doesn't have the same worries and fears that I do every day. If he loses his job, he's broke and upset. If I lose my job, I lose my entire life.
I don't know if this will be the end of our years of best friendship. If it is, well... Maybe it's for the best. Not emotionally; I know there will come a day when I want to text him, but won't be able to. But this may be the universe's way of pushing me towards friends that will understand my growth.
Nothing gold can stay.
*This girl strikes me as being sort of flowery, so I think Daisy suits.
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