Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
I knew the moment we tried to check in at the baggage desk that the the trip was going to be a disaster.
It was supposed to be the ultimate girls' weekend away - me and my best friend in Paris for four days. It was a trip we had contemplated for years and booked just a few weeks prior. With two very young children at home, the trip took on an increased importance for me as free social time was at a premium and no friendship had suffered from the neglect of new motherhood as much as this one.
As soon as we got to the airport, things took a turn for the worse. We were advised that our flight was overbooked and, having not confirmed our seats online, there was a strong possibility that we were not going to get seats on the plane. Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn't, perhaps alternative arrangements would be made, perhaps they would not... Who knew if or when we might make our way to Paris. In all my years of travel, I had never had this happen before. She had and the story was a disaster. It was an omen of things to come.
To say that the trip did not live up to my expectations would be a gross understatement. I could not have in my wildest nightmares predicted how bad the trip would be. Even all these weeks later, after many long, hard, emotional hours of contemplation, it is difficult to put into words what went wrong. I could say that for the first time ever, we did not travel well together but that would not accurately depict what occurred. From my perspective (and indeed that is all I can offer), I found my dear friend to be an incredibly negative force. It was not the first time I had observed this in her. To the contrary, it had been a long time building, something which her other very close friend had commented to her about some months before. She repeated her friend's comments to me, dismissing them as drunken ramblings. But I had my nagging doubts. I was able to see how a series of poor personal choices had started to impact her adversely. She was not happy. I could see it in her physically and hear it in her emotionally. I tried to encourage her to address the situation, to reverse the damage. It wasn't too late. She was still young and had not been sentenced to live her life unhappily ever after.
Nowhere was her unhappiness more palpable than when we were in Paris. Being in my favourite city, a vibrant city so full of history and *life*, I had a very difficult time coping with her flat affect and continually negative comments. For me, it was unfathomable to be in Paris and to feel anything but exuberant excitement. I had spent hours and hours planning this trip and simply could not bear what I felt was a negative albatross around my neck. So I called her on it. On a bridge over the River Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the background, I asked her whether she was enjoying the trip. Without a glimmer of excitement, emotion or affect, she claimed that she was. It's hard to put into words the emotional void, the emotional impotence I felt emanating from her. It was unfamiliar territory and, along with the constant negativity, it was hard for me to bear.
I said nothing further on this subject for the rest of the trip. I knew her well enough to know that she did not deal well with conflict. For the first time in my life, I kept my big mouth shut. My resentment built and I could not wait to be away from her. I could not wait to go home.
And even when we got home, I did not confront her about what had, or had not, happened in Paris. Having not heard a peep from her in over a week following our return, I sent her what I thought was an innocuous "how are you" email. And then --- KABOOM!!! The claws came out, along with the insults and irrational accusations, and everything was on the table. It was ugly, it was raw, and, it turns out, it was un-retractable. While I had seen inklings of it years earlier, she hit me with her full Scorpion force. Once again, contrary to my nature, I held my tongue knowing that there was no reasoning with her irrationality and nothing good could or would come of sinking to that level.
When, like me, you come from a dysfunctional family, your friends become your family, your friends become your world. Like most of my close friendships, it was impossible to delineate how and when our friendship started. It was as if I had known her forever. I truly believed that she was my soulmate. After a familial background of instability and inconsistency, she was always there for me, completely, totally and (I thought) unconditionally. She literally and figuratively supported me through the many turbulent months of my divorce. She was by my side in the delivery room when I gave birth to my first child. She encouraged me not to thrown in the towel, to keep working on my relationship with the Dragon. She was a once in a lifetime friend and this was a once in a lifetime friendship.
Having now had the rose-coloured glasses ripped off of my face, I can in retrospect see things which perhaps I did not want to admit before about our friendship. I can see now how perhaps, like many of my previous relationships, I was attracted to her because she let me lead the way, let me do what I wanted to do. I set the agenda and she followed along. I also most definately now recognize her pattern of never taking responsibility for conflict with other people. Nothing was ever her fault. It was always the other person - her crazy sister, her asshole father, her nasty husband, her alcoholic friend... And now it's me. The overbearing, bossy bitch.
Initially, I thought that things would work out. I waited and I hoped. As I told her in my last email to her, I viewed our relationship as a long term marriage with this crappy trip being but a bump in the road. I suggested we go and see my couples counsellor. Days turned into weeks which have now turned into months and I have heard nothing from her. I learned of her eldest daughter's pregnancy via facebook. It was like a knife to the heart. While her absence has left a void in my life, I fear there is no turning back. This simply is not how I deal with people. This is not how I deal with conflict. The thing that hurts the most is the fact that after nine years of close friendship she didn't care about me enough to, at minimum, make the effort to either talk things out or, more importantly, take any steps to salvage the friendship. One argument, one disagreement, one bad trip was all it took for her to exorcise me from her life. A lot has happened in my life since that trip. I often ruminate on the fact that she does not know about any or all of these things.
I miss her deeply.
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