Different kind of grief
Have you ever experienced a friendship or relationship breaking apart so terribly and irreparably that you grieve it like you'd grieve for a recently deceased loved one?
Like you don't even grieve the person, but the companionship, the late night talks that exposed questions about existence and deeply hidden feelings coming into star-brightened darkness, the occasional laughing fits, the warm smiles, the content silences...
She was the last one I had. In person I mean. I cherish and appreciate my online friends with a soul-crushing passion, but the in-person companionship I crave is a kind of void that they just cannot fulfill, not anytime soon at least.
We were unhappy even before our relationship changed labels, I think. We didn't have much in common anymore, after (then) 15 years of having been friends, our interests and expectations in life and romance had drifted apart instead of closer together and it should have been the first sign that turning our relationship into a romantic one was a terrible idea.
I was unhappy, I ended up being the initiator of practically everything, be it touch or conversation or addressing problems. It was always me that stepped forward, and the lines between platonic and romantic felt like a blurry and dangerous path to tread on without her telling me what is too far and what isn't, so sticking to small displays of affection like occasionally holding hands and a few gentle kisses to the cheek or forehead were the most bravery I could muster and the most I received in turn. I was touchstarved and desperately craving physical proximity, in part to battle my internalized self hatred that told me I was undesirable and only her last resort choice after 3 failed relationships of her own.
One time she exploded on me, her years worth of bottled up frustration and anger at the world bubbling up over a relatively small situation via text, intentionally twisting my words to be angry with me and vent more of her tension. She apologized later, but the panic attack I had that day would stick with me for far longer still.
I would start noticing when she lied about her feelings.
The way I recognized her typing style shift, her voice grow meek, the sudden increase of time required to form responses. Seeing the signs was easy, but discerning the cause was always about as clear to me as milk.
I was taught that honesty and communication were key in maintaining healthy relationships, so I would ask her if I did something wrong or if we needed to talk something out in any way, because I had noticed her tone change mid-conversation.
She would always insist that everything was fine, maintaining her facade of the perfectly composed adult.
I believed her and reinforced the chains that bound me to her.
We would start writing less, seeing each other less, despite only living two blocks apart. It was more and more difficult to get any mutually beneficial conversation going and we'd get frustrated being around each other in person after as little as 3 hours too. She at some point insulted my interests and got angry at me for struggling to share hers. I've tried to bring our lack of intimacy and unclear boundaries to attention too one day, only to have her shake her head and tell me that she's fine with whatever, that she doesn't need much to be happy. What we had didn't cut it for me and it had hurt, having my feelings ignored like this, so I refrained from trying again.
I thought it better to not poke the sleeping bear anyways.
Then, someone new tumbled into my life, someone with a passion as sparkling and intense as my own, a lonely soul masked in a charmingly awkward, ironic bravado and bluntly thrown quips. It didn't take long for us to click and converse on the daily. The more we learned of each other, the more similarities we found.
He lives several hundred kilometers away, but it still took only two months of daily texting and several hours of voice and videochat for me to fall head over heels.
I felt so unbelievably guilty.
I couldn't sever the chains that tied me to her out of fear of playing into her insecurities, but by the time I met him I had already been feeling like a bird stuck in a cage - solely there for her comfort, putting her feelings before my own, always. I was unhappy, we weren't working. But I cared more about her than myself, so I told myself I wouldn't break up with her.
Things got messy from there, too much back and forth with me desperately clawing for any bit of selfish compromise I could get my hands on.
She eventually had enough of it and broke up with me, but we promised we'd stay friends.
She put on her porcelain mask of careful indifference and things went smoothly for a while.
It didn't take long for the mask to crack though. It was too frail to withstand her jealousy, her heartache, and eventually it fell apart.
She came to me with misinterpreted situations and long ago wrongdoings I've comitted to cross her, talking over me when I attempted to correct her or defend myself, accusing me of being a lying, backstabbing bitch who was not an ounce better than the grovelling, attention-starved crybabies that play the victim card at and every opportinity. Then she insulted me and my loved ones up and down.
Then she left.
And I wailed as my shaking fingers blocked her on every site I could think of, terrified of her wrath and scared of more to come.
And then I hated her, for her hypocrisy and the hurt she's inflicted on me, as the realization of her small manipulative tactics to keep me bound to her slowly sunk in (for the sake of maintaining her anonymity I will not go into detail about how specifically she manipulated me, but know that there was what I now understand to have been some gaslighting involved).
Now, over a year after she confronted me, all I have left are the glowing embers of grief replacing my rage, and the understanding that I too have made more mistakes than I can count and had originally realized.
Now it doesn't matter who had ultimately been at fault, or whether or not her behavior was hypocritical or just.
All I know is that now I am lonely and tired.
Tired of being angry and hurt.
Tired of remembering her in all those little, painful ways that have shaped my life over the 16 years I've known her.
I still have him and my online friends and feel more balanced and supported than I've ever been, but in losing her I have also lost my only remaining real life friend and along with it, the kind of companionship my online friends cannot give.
She's written me a letter together with some old art of mine since that last fateful conflict, actually.
It made all of my emotions flare up again.
On the first read it had felt sincere, she was apologizing for not letting me defend myself in our last conversation all those months ago, that she's doing better now, especially in handling her emotions more openly and hasn't had any outbursts since. She also said she'd send me the art pieces and gifts I've given her over the years back if she found more of them.
On the second read it felt like salt in an open wound, an attempt to rub in that she is over me, better off without me while I was still stuck in my grief and hurt. I've written countless drafts of response letters, ranging from long and infuriated, to brief and sorrowful, to sarcastically apologetic until eventually I gave up trying altogether. Too stricken with negative emotions to think clearly.
I'm still unsure which outcome would be pettier of me, trying to get the last word in, or deciding she doesn't deserve an answer? Would sending her a response incite an attempt to mend our lost friendship and rekindle it, or would not answering imply my agreement to have her send back more items in the future?
It made me realize that I don't actually want her back in my life.
That it's not her that I miss, but rather the easy in-person companionship I've had with her, the happiness and comfort that comes with it.
By writing this post I was kind of hoping to find a different kind of closure, by getting my thoughts and feelings out about it all without actually writing her back.
I'm still hurting and lonely, but it's gotten better, continues to get better.
If you've read this far - and really, I don't think there's much of a reason you would, you don't know me after all, so why should you care - thank you for lending a patient ear to a grieving stranger.
If you think that you are who this whole post is centered around:
I genuinely do hope you are doing well. That you will find happiness, comfort, genuine companionship and a warm meal and bed to return to every day.
I just wish for it to be far away from my own.
