I go on caring for you
the way a person keeps
walking toward a house
that isn't there anymore.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to.
And I don't know if the love
I learned from you
is mine to keep.
At the moment I am grieving a friendship that has ended. It is not the first friendship I’ve lost, but it is one of the deepest, and the loss has knocked my confidence in ways I didn’t expect. We don’t commonly discuss the endings of friendships, especially those that are sudden, definitive and chosen. And so it’s felt particularly helpful when I have heard stories from others who can relate to some of the same shapes of loss.
Intimacy depends on truth-telling. It’s one of the wonderful parts of friendship — that you get to delight in someone, and with them, in the truth of who they are. When you trust a friend, you keep a kind of quiet faith that the person who has chosen your company is, in some fundamental way, on your side. You know that you choose each other in spite of, not in ignorance of, the flaws you each carry. You will sometimes be irritating, or distracted, or inconsiderate, without meaning to be. Sometimes you will be worse than that, and sometimes you will be at your worst. The love you share is what allows the friendship to bear it, or not.
This is of course part of being known: that someone comes to see you in a way that exists outside your own narration, and forms opinions about what they see. At its best, this is one of the deep joys of friendship. Someone reflects back to you something about yourself they cherish, and you get to receive it as a gift — a version of yourself you couldn’t have given yourself, made more real in that shared friendship. But the same closeness that makes that gift possible also makes the opposite possible. When things go badly, you hear yourself described in language you would never have chosen, by someone who has earned, through long acquaintance, the right to be listened to.
Endings are ordinary. People drift, friendships fade, lives move apart, and most of the time the parting carries no special weight beyond the sadness of something good being over. Endings that feel like they carry verdicts are harder. This kind of ending is, in the end, a rejection — by someone who knows you well, who once chose you, and has now chosen otherwise. It feels achey to have been found wanting by someone who you care about and trusted.
When an ending is abrupt and total, it feels like a betrayal. The premise of the friendship is undermined in such a way that you are left guessing the extent to which what went before it wasn’t real. You feel naive that you didn’t anticipate it, and begin to wonder who else might be about to announce their exit.
It is hard to explain the ending to others. If they are mystified, reminding you of the strength they saw in the friendship, it sharpens the sense of loss, powerlessness, and shame that you were unable to rescue something so valuable to you. If they find an explanation on your behalf, it competes with those parts of you still hoping the ending isn’t real, and holding onto the friend you thought you had. You wonder how it is so easy for them to let go of this person on your behalf, and if they could let go of you like that, too.
I am trying to make peace with the fact that sometimes we fail. All of us do, sooner or later, in the small ways and the larger ones. It is a wonderful thing when by mutual commitment can weather those disappointments and the changes life brings. Sometimes however, that failure takes a friendship with it. I really wish it didn’t.
thejoyofrachel 