I ran into an old friend today I haven't seen for probably fifteen years. We were close when we were in high school and in our twenties, travelled together, had the usual wacky misadventures. She was the one who taught me to pee standing up! She was there on the skeery clueless-tourist nighttime subway ride to Coney Island, where the NYC police officer told us we should get our white girl asses back on the train and return to Manhatten because it wasn't safe. She was there when the guys at the next table to us in the IHOP at 2 am suddenly started having a knife fight in the middle of our pancakes. She was a "partner in crime" kind of friend and she was a sweet, funny girl.
But we grew apart. She occasionally did things that hurt me, as friends will. One time--and I remember this well--she was in the MGH, rehabbing from surgery on her arm, and I went to visit. There was a guy on the floor that she'd made friends with and whom she had a crush on, and she introduced us. And proceeded to tell him this story from our high school days that showed her in a very flattering light while making me seem...pathetic wouldn't be too strong a word. I was mortified. And while I understood even then why she did it--she was terribly insecure that he might like me better than her--it hurt. There were other rare occasions like that, never purposefully malicious, just the kind of things girls do to each other when they're young and not very self-aware. But that wasn't what eventually made the friendship lapse.
What happened was that she was struggling with depression, and how this presented was in her just dropping off the face of the earth for months. She wouldn't call or return calls, she wouldn't want to see anyone. Then six months later, she'd call and want to be best friends again. Well, I was struggling with depression too, a broken marriage, and single parenthood, and somewhere along the line, I decided I only wanted friends who were going to be there for me when I needed them. I cut a lot of people out of my life. She was one of them. I moved during one of her six month disappearing acts and never bothered to give her my new address or phone number, even though I occasionally ran into her sister.
I've felt kind of bad about that over the years.
There were a lot of hugs this morning, a lot of "ohmygod, what have you been up to"s and "you look great!"s, and we exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together. And I'm feeling kind of weird about it, actually. I'm a different person than I was fifteen or twenty years ago, as I'm sure she is. Can we pick up this friendship? Will it be more mature and healthy if we do?
xoxo
1 comment:
No great insights, but I read your post right when I turned Michael Apted's 49 Up on PBS. The series, shot every seven years follows a group of poor, middle-class, and upper-class children from the age of seven on (till 49, at this point). And what bears on your post is how so many individuals both change and stay the same over time, often simultaneously.
I actually preferred some of the earlier installments, as by age 49 they have so much material and so many years to cover that it's more of a quick digest than the earlier ones, which had more time to go into more depth and show (at least via judicious editing) the strong resemblences between those in their 20s and 30s and the children they were at 7 and 14.
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