Friendly goodbye

I remember so vividly pressing my hands to the back window of our car, staring through teary eyes as Four-Eyed-FeFe-Feuge-Face’s actual face receded from sight. It was an affectionate name with no parts of malice in it and she stood at the end of the cul-de-sac, waving at me from her front yard. My dad chuckled in the front seat. He isn’t a mean man but for some reason my separation torment was amusing to him. Looking back it could just be that he understood what I am still amazed to find truth in…that friendships change and shift and grow and shrink and appear and disappear in seemingly random fashion.

We thought we’d be best friends forever, but i can’t tell you where she lives or what she is doing now.

My ideas about friendship haven’t changed much since the fifth grade when I first met Four Eyes. I still attach myself to friends with the intent of forever, even as I know that forever is much less infinite than I thought when I was younger.

And so friends have come into my life. Beautiful amazing friends who blazed marks across the way I see the world. People who helped me pick up pieces that shattered in front of me and laughed hysterically when my world showcased lunacy. They let me wade into their waters and learn who they were, and let me help build and repair and reap and rejoice with them as life unraveled and rewove itself on their journey.

 I’ve had some lovely friendships. I loved fiercely in them.

I’ve also had friendships sail…away…

Some of my deepest sorrows are at the loss of friendships. I read an article once that said that divorce was so painful because people come to share a brain. There is no sense in both people retaining all of the information they share and so, instead, they divvy it up. One person remembers the bank information and the other the shopping list. And together they are magnificent but wrenched apart they are pieces that feel somehow smaller than the sum they once were.

I feel that way about friendships.

I don’t speak of casual friends. I mean friendship. I mean the people that seep under your skin and make themselves family. The people who have celebrated you at your best and still love you at your worst. The ones who can tell you you are messing up in one breath and help you make it better in the next. The ones who love you not for who you claim to be, or want to be, or even what you aren’t…i’m talking friend in its most elegant and rare form.

So when i lose a friend i ache.

Once, it was through death. But that is a different ache.

I speak of the longing, not of someone beyond my grasp – not really. I speak of missing a person who still exists in the world. Who still laughs and sneezes and asks questions and seeks comfort…someone who does all of those things, but not with me.

Sometimes a parting of ways feels natural. A path diverging. That ache is small. Maybe not an ache at all, simply an absence.

But sometimes the parting feels violent, sudden, random, unfair. The ache from partings like those is expansive, the absence gaping, the loss epic. It is a divorce of sorts. The stories those people take with them when they go, the shared language, the historical shorthand that negated the need for explanations, are losses that require grieving.

I am stunned that someone once significant in my life is walking the earth carrying pieces of me and my life with them. How are they able to do it? How is a hole not blasted into their brains-their hearts- cauterizing the spot that once held me?

But love and life don’t work that way. I find there is little control over how deeply someone will burrow into my life and no control over how quickly and completely they might leave it. Each friendship is a crapshoot that could leave me with my hands pressed against the car window…or worse, standing in your front yard while my best friend drives away.

It is enough to hold the idea of friendship hostage. Almost. Enough to keep the world at bay through pleasantries and “nice enough”. Almost. Enough to forgo friendships for acquaintances – like sugar for Splenda and say it is the same thing. Almost.

But tonight, one of my besties left me three successive messages filled with passages she wanted me to hear from Nikki Giovanni’s new book. My voicemail cut her off at least once but i could hear the excitement in her voice in each message. Nikki is part of our shared language and so i was excited too.

I could forgo the risk of aching but Splenda doesn’t get you Nikki poetry readings. Some things are worth risk.