- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 4
-
Sparkle (0)
This summer, I've been dealing with something that I haven't dealt with in a long time: a breakup.
No, not the boy-kind of breakup. I broke up with my best friend.
This decision did not come easily. In many ways, I stayed in the relationship with my best friend because like most women, I've been trained to think of "my girls" as first in my life. Men may come and go, but friends last forever, that sort of thing. Forget about that report about women bullying women in the workplace. Forget about that book that inspired the movie Mean Girls. My best friend and I had been friends for 10 years. We were above that type of thing. Weren't we?
We'd been through so much. She'd talked me through a bad breakup that happened in a restaurant a few years ago. I ended up in the restaurant bathroom, on the floor, tears streaming down my face, wondering how I was going to get through the rest of the night. She was right there on the phone with me, talking me through it. When my best friend moved overseas for a year, we kept in touch and when she came back, it was like she was never gone. We lived in different cities throughout most of our friendship, but unlike those college friends you have that drift away, we always remained close.
We were so alike, I think. We were both neurotic, slightly crazy. We liked the same things: men, coffee and cigarettes. We hated the same things: men, mean people and right-wingers. What went wrong?
We started to drift apart like any couple does, I suppose. While my best friend continued having short-term, highly emotional flings, I settled into a solitary life by myself. Without the drama. While my best friend continued to obsess about her weight and her looks, I started to accept my body as it was. While my friend continued to hate her parents for childhood grievances, I moved closer to my family and learned how good it feels to forgive.
While I'm writing this, I'm afraid I'm not giving you the whole picture. I'm afraid of coming off like she's the one with the problems. I know I've got problems. But I started to hate having them thrown in my face by my best friend.
I started to hate that I would always get unsolicited advice from her. On everything. On what I should wear, how I should style my hair, what I should do over the weekend. Over the past couple of years, I wondered if I had been that lost and that insecure for so many years that I didn't notice this about her.
I guess I started to grow up, and because the power-balance with me and my best friend had always been that I was slightly crazier than she, slightly more unbalanced, it was her duty to help me along.
But I didn't want her to be my "mommy" anymore. I wanted her to be my friend.
Like any relationship that's ending, things went from bad to worse. She told me my hair looked like shit. We went a week without talking. She started dropping subtle, accusatory questions into our conversations like, "Did you eat any vegetables today? I bet you didn't. Did you drink any water today, or just diet Coke?"
I guess the last straw was sometime in the winter. My sister-in-law was pregnant. She was having some trouble. Bleeding. I called my best friend. She said, "Maybe she'll have a miscarriage!" And she cackled, gleefully. I was shocked. Had my single, best friend become so bitter and angry that she was actually happy at the thought that my sister-in-law might lose a child she really wanted?
I broke up with my best friend the cowardly way: I stopped talking to her and stopped returning her calls. Things had been tense enough that she didn't pursue it.
I guess I just didn't have it in me to rehash everything that I felt was wrong in the relationship. I didn't want to fight with her anymore. I just wanted it to be done with.
That's not to say I wanted it to be over. I didn't. I still loved her, you see. Loved her like a sister for so many years.
Like any breakup, this one is painful. I still have imaginary arguments with her in my head. I still remember some fucked up thing she said and get angry about it. And yeah,
