I am a bad friend and know that I should change, but I just can’t.
This past weekend, I skipped my high school and college best friend’s wedding shower. It was a surprise shower given by one of our other friends from school. I didn’t even RSVP. I knew I was going to do this and felt bad about it the whole time, but for lots of reasons I couldn’t change the way I dealt with it.
My reasons? It should have been me giving her the shower, but I cringe at such displays. I hate wedding showers and baby showers and anything where people get together to celebrate things that I think are personal events. Maybe I am broken. There’s other stuff too. There are reasons why at 29 years old, I referred to this person as my former best friend. Reasons like time and space and geography and lifestyle and tons of other things. The slow death of such a close friendship is ugly. Sometimes I wish she hated me for any reason. Any reason at all. I wish she never called. I wish she didn’t send me Christmas cards.
The slow death of such a close friendship is like breaking up with your high school boyfriend without ever discussing it. Just slowly fading from each other’s view, like dropping them at the deep end of the pool. You can still see them, but you can’t reach them. In some ways, we were each other’s first love, really. Not in a sexual way, but in the way teenage girls love each other. It was about learning to love ourselves, really. It was an amazing friendship, but there was no falling out, no huge yelling, just a slow drifting away.
Thinking of her makes me miss platonic love. Makes me miss who we used to be. Makes me miss being so young. And being just another woman at another silly wedding shower would have reminded me even more of what I have lost.
Someday I’ll feel bad about this. Someday I will want her to share my joys and she won’t be there because of what I have done.