An “Open” Letter.

Dear So-and-Sos:

I had a dream about you last night. In my dream, I was in Jasper and I ran into you. When you saw me, you ran right up to me and hugged me and cried. You didn’t really say anything but that hug was something that even in my waking state, I can almost still feel. I haven’t dreamed about you in a while. Whenever I have, it was angry and I woke up feeling differently than I did this morning.

I was thinking about the past. I was thinking about how, when we were combative and not speaking, neither of us made an effort to reconcile. I thought about how currently, I am teaching my students the importance of “reconciliation” and that I have not ‘reconciled’, because I want some kind of upper hand, because I am still ‘angry’, I am a hypocrite. And I can’t justifiably claim that reconciliation is important to me when I haven’t actually embodied that in my life, in my former friendships, in my experiences with loss and anger.

The fact remains: I am hurt. I am hurt because I feel hard-done-by in our previous relationship. I feel like nobody ever heard me, listened to me, sided with me and really understood my life or where I was coming from. Those feelings forced me to react badly and in doing so I lost my cool. I lost a lot. I was immature and made an immature decision. And now what remains is this: I am still bitter. I don’t regret a loss of friendship. I don’t feel differently about where I would like things to be now. But, I regret being still bitter if only because I wanted to “win” and now, approaching 30 and thinking back on all of this bad blood, I have realized that “winning” really isn’t all that important.

All I want to express is this regret. And all I want to stress about this regret is: this isn’t some plea to return to how things were because I don’t want that and I’m assuming you don’t either. This isn’t an olive branch, because peace is sometimes just unnecessary, impossible, or a waste of everyone’s efforts. This isn’t me bending over backwards to please because I’ve done that too, and I’m not that person anymore. What this is, is: forgiveness. Forgiving myself because I fucked up. Forgiving you for fucking up. Not forgiveness for the purpose of rekindling some friendship that was obviously never built to last in the first place, but forgiveness so that we can move forward in life without aiming to “win”, without looking back scathingly, without saying one thing then meaning another, and most importantly: with expressing real, genuine, TRUE feelings about how we felt in this situation. Admitting that we were both vulnerable, that we both cared, that what happened was actually hurtful. Because it was. I know it, you know it, and regardless of how that pain has eased up significantly since the last time we spoke or even saw each other, pain is a part of a breakup. Pain is a part of who we became afterwards, maybe even who we became now. And admitting to that pain is also something that can help reconcile the uncertainties of the past.

It’s ridiculous that nobody ever admitted they were hurt by the utter catastrophic detonation of a 6-year best friendship, and instead all parties took a silent, bridge-burning turn towards an unfeeling desire to be “better off”. This decision is the most immature, stupid and backwards decision I’ve ever made. What I want to say to you, should you ever read this is this: all of this has fucked me up a lot. All of this has had me questioning my past, the genuineness of it, my ability to carry on a relationship, people’s true motives (including my own), and my ability to be what I define as a ‘good person’. All of this has made me feel bitter, angry, at times tearful, and griping. I lost a lot. Of self-respect, of respect for others, of trust, of self-expression. All of those things washed down the drain like toothpaste and I watched it spin and spin until it dwindled down to nothing but gross old residue of something from another time that I can barely even see or remember. And I am deeply, deeply angry about this still. I’m pissed off at how hurt I fell with absolutely no apology or acknowledgement. I’m saddened by own shying away from the emotional healing that accompanies a breakup of any kind, all because I wanted to “prove something” to you. I’m angry at all of your snide shoving-out of me, casting me aside proudly and making grand announcements about doing so on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. I’m fucking pissed as shit that after I never spoke to you again, you never, ever, ever contacted me to try and end things with something softer and gentler than complete silence and then instead of acknowledging this privately with me, you post an INSTAGRAM with some stupid fucking quote about saying goodbye then choosing to announce in public, on an account I don’t even follow, about my life and how you feel about it. And somehow did you feel that was supposed to fix or make anything better? For you, or for me, or for anyone at all? Was it enough? After six years, was it really enough and could you really stand before me now and say that was not just supposed to be enough for me to move on but also yourself? Have you moved on? Or are you going to bother pretending like this is all 100% okay for you now because you’re better off without me and casting me aside this way was the best thing you’ve ever done? It wasn’t for me. I regret it. I messed up, and I’m willing to be vulnerable because I don’t believe anymore that vulnerability is a sign of weakness. It took me 30 years but I finally figured out that it’s okay to do things like cry in front of your boyfriend or cry when you’ve had a bad day at work. I hope you have too.

I write this letter as a plea for some reprieve from the anger and sadness that plagues me in small but tinny, biting welts in my soul that only sleep, alcohol and loved ones can make disappear. I write this letter with the hope that in some fantasy land that doesn’t actually exist in waking life, that you and I could sit down and have coffee and air all our grievances and cry and get pissed off and make all the snide and angry comments in the world but feel better after it. And I write this letter to acknowledge that fighting dirty – a cold war chocked full of silent warfare, is not the way to end anything. I hope you understand and ‘get’ where I’m coming from with this. This is how I’m feeling today. This is how I often feel. And I’m growing both comfortable with that, and aggravated by it, all at the same time.

Sincerely,

Ex-friends.

I had a whole life 7-8 years ago and that life has been completely destroyed. I look back at old photos and think about old memories as if I’m someone looking at the rubble of their former city. I wonder sometimes how I even go to a place in my life when almost everyone and everything that was so important to me — that once made me feel complete, and alive, and safe – dissipated entirely until it was 100% nothing. People that I once shared everything with from jewelry, to Halloweens, to annual birthday trips, are now just old crumbled foundations of buildings – strong, beautiful buildings — that have been burnt to the ground. They’re glimpses of something that is long, long gone as if in an old decrepit and unrelateable photo in a history book. I never expected life to turn out that way.

Losing people so catastrophically, violently and grandly feels like a divorce, a death, a train crash. It’s so much more than just letting events and people and memories go. It’s rebuilding your life, a new life where you have to consider that everyone and everything you trusted, held true and believed so deeply in, was all a big, nasty lie. That there are no such thing as the ‘bffs’ that your first real love told you in his cynical, sardonic tone did not in fact exist. That there’s no such thing as retiring to Palm Springs with your lifelong college mates as Carol Shields suggests in “The Stone Diaries”. That the notion of girlhood and everything associated with it as you believed it, to be washed away as simply as waves dredging rogue seaweed scraps onto barren sand. Losing people this way- with betrayal on one end and yelling and purposeful hurt on the other – is something you don’t really forget. You may not lose sleep over it, but what happens instead is this pang. This realization whenever these people come to mind, that out there in this big wide universe, you have enemies. Enemies that couldn’t even be bothered to make things right. Enemies that talked shit about you on social media in their late twenties. Enemies who at one point cried in your arms because of the boy who ghosted. Enemies who at one point you sent care packages to when they moved across the country. Enemies you texted so often each day that you literally blew up each other’s phones with mundane and frivolous conversations. Enemies that make you an enemy, too. When you never wanted to be ‘enemies’. The most hurtful thing is that you both became enemies. And if you encounter each other again, there will be either death stares, or side eye, or worse: truly, painfully awkward silence. Enemies who are all still as close as anything in the world with one another but who have all decided to kick you to the curb.

Why did this happen? How does this happen? What I lost is different from similar losses. The enemies I have made now were so close with me we received joint wedding invitations; we were never seen apart; when in the same classes during our undergrad years, we literally blew our TA’s mind with our thinking alike and acting alike and laughing alike. We weren’t just friends. We weren’t just friends who had a ‘falling out’. We were family whose family tree rotted, died, turned black, fell apart into irreparable ash. And when I think about it, even for more than the split millisecond I think about each day, I cannot fathom that pain, that shattered dream, that ruined close connection. If I dwell on this for even one split millisecond longer, I get suddenly so angry and sad and confused and ask again: WHY? WHY and HOW do people who were  this close with me, completely disappear? Why can’t things ever be like they were? What happened to the formative years of my twenties and when can or will something replace that notion of girlhood that has been cruelly ripped out of my gut? Why do people get divorced, why do we have to let go of the ones we love so much that an old photo just triggers so much of this incredible anger that I feel towards people that I would have done anything for?

In life now I have the most amazing career someone could ever ask for. I live in a place that doesn’t feel like home but it’s quiet, charming even, and full of incredibly wonderful people. I have a partner who I’ve gone to hell and back with and still value our Friday night dinner dates as much as I did when we were first falling in love. I have reconnected with my oldest friends and realized the qualities they possess, and the qualities they awaken in me, have been more worthwhile and important than I ever realized and that realization has both made me feel guilty, but also made me feel grateful. We can’t have it all, and we can’t sometimes let things go as easily as we’d like but we also can’t ignore the hope that the good things have brought in the wake of what has been broken. The world is incredibly complicated and strange and shocking. There are things that pain and things that heal, and things that lay dormant in the small, cozy caves of your mind before one day out of nowhere they sneak out of their hideaways just long enough to make you feel that pale-faced, hand-shaking anger and springing tears just one more stupid time before you cram them back into the place where they came from. I took a day today to think of and honour those feelings in a way I haven’t really done in a long time.

 

Now I’m going to floss my teeth, and turn on Sports Net, and then go back to the tedium of my idle Tuesday in late April.

Looking Back.

There was this time in my life when I looked into the eyes of my first love – the very first one that I believed was “real” – and I could see everything in my past and future, all in those hazel-green wide mischievous eyes. He was all I wanted, and all I thought that I could ever have the capacity to love. I believed that my hopes and dreams and obsessions with him were true love and somehow, someday, he would realize what I realized. and looking back now, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

When we love at first sight we tend to inject that love into someone’s actions and words even when it’s not there, not even remotely. It colours our view and vision of every single thing. that we remember about them; that fondness, that longing, those happy memories that were so fleeting they were addictive, and so we tried to recreate them again and again. And when we were successful there was hope; and when we were unsuccessful we were alone at home, licking our own wounds and making up stories that confirmed for us all the horrible icky awful things that haunted our nightmares: it’s over, he doesn’t love me, he loves someone else, soon this will all be over and the door will close and that will be that forever. How can I go on?

Looking back I wondered repeatedly why I was so unworthy of love; if it wasn’t from the person I thought I loved more than anyone, how could anyone ever love me? Why would they? Surely, if I was worthy of love, all of that would have worked out for me. It’s amazing how someone you would give anything to and do anything for, can make you feel so badly about yourself, looking back.

Being blindsided like that by my first love was one of the events in my life I least saw coming. It was a sure thing. It had to be. I felt like I was wilting away and my real self was in bed somewhere, dreaming the whole thing. I was watching this on a screen. I was rubbing my eyes and pinching myself desperate to wake up from my worst nightmare. And then when I woke up the morning after, only to realize the day before had actually happened, I punched my pillow and teared up, then I went to work, then I went to class, then I, humiliated, had to tell my friends what had happened. Looking back, I know now they were gleeful about it. Looking back, those people were never my friends.

Looking back, I realize I’m still angry at all the people who hurt me because they never actually gave me propulsion forward. They never allowed me the opportunities to heal that I deserved. I continually wished and hoped for conversations that would lay to rest all my bad feelings and confusion, but those conversations never came and I was just left angry because nobody ever gave me a reason not to be. Am I angry at my first love anymore? No. But I’m angry at me. For being that person that allowed myself to be treated like that by someone who never, not even for a moment, deserved my love and attention and worship. I’m angry at myself for thinking that just because my first love didn’t love me back, that I didn’t deserve love whatsoever, from anyone. Currently in my life I have the greatest love I’ve ever, ever known and maybe ever could and looking back, I couldn’t have been more wrong about who I chose to give that love to for the first time.

But maybe, that’s what life is about. Maybe growing up is designed to prepare us through hard lessons like this, how to love properly and fully with, not for, people who deserve it. Maybe love is not the answer to people’s pain, but it drives us to put aside pain for the benefit of love and growth and true happiness. I wonder if my first love understood that, or if, because my love was so, so one-sided, he even thinks about it or cares about it at all, or if he learned anything whatsoever. I wonder if my first love is still figuring out how to love on his own without the worship of people he never loved back. I can’t wonder, though. Because there’s no point wondering about something you’ll never know about, just as, looking back, you can’t love when there’s no point in loving.

And so, looking back, I have learned a great deal about myself in the last eight years and those lessons were extremely hard to learn, and yet, here I am, better off because of them. I would never pretend things were perfect or that I don’t on some days, or in some moments, don’t nurse unhealed wounds inflicted by the people in my past. And if they’re reading this, I hope they do take comfort and satisfaction in that. No. Things aren’t perfect. But they’re better, and they continue to get better still. And I’m in a better place in my life emotionally, with this ability to look back and view from a safe distance, all my mistakes and where they have led me.

Losing is never easy, nor is heartbreak. Loss and heartbreak are wounds that are only healed with time and the more we face them and stare them down, the better our well-being becomes, slowly but surely.

Closure.

Closure is an elusive and undefinable thing, but to me it means essentially, the idea that letting go comes from two places; yours and theirs. And in order to move forward – I mean really move forward, you have to allow yourself to look and feel vulnerable to that person so that you can let them go. And sometimes that’s all it takes. Words. Vulnerability. Allowing yourself to look like a desperate loser who deserves to be laughed at. And somehow that embarrassing feeling of being vulnerable to others, helps us forget them. Why? I don’t know. Because it allows us to have the last word? Because embarrassment trumps anger and resentment? Or because there really, truly is power in vulnerability…?

In my life, all I’ve ever wanted or needed from anyone was “closure” but sometimes it’s more like a unicorn than anything else. Sometimes the people in our lives don’t allow us to have closure. They leave us hanging and entrapped, and they leave us constantly wondering; what if I allowed myself to be vulnerable to them and I allowed myself to suddenly go through that horrid and icky, angry feeling of never feeling you got to say what you really, truly wanted to say? What if… what if. And on and on it goes, until suddenly you are surrounded by nightmares and anger and sadness.

When considering when and how to eliminate someone from your life, even if it’s for the best, these are things I think about. I think first and foremost about the memories. The wonderful, full, rich numerous days of life and support and amazing conversations I’ve had with them. The ways I laughed so so so hard when I was with them. The ways I felt like they appreciated our inside jokes and observations about the world, and the ways we acted like girls – truly, truly effeminate girls in the truest sense of the world – because we could, when we were together. The times I stood by this person – even deleting their exes from Facebook regardless of my feelings about them, if only because I constantly wore a badge of protectiveness and strong, unbridled loyalty to my lovely friends, who I thought would be there for me forever. The way we got to play the race card. The way we could look into the lives of others and see the cruel humour in those lives, even if it wasn’t necessarily the most ‘right’ way to look at everything. All of that was my twenties. In my twenties I laughed and loved and appreciated so much of what these friendships brought forth in my life. I hang onto hem. I love and care about them. I still do. And I always will.

But – I was the one whose love and affection was taken for granted, taken advantage of, who always feels the need to look and feel vulnerable, to make odes and laments and eulogies to the past. And no one else seems to be able to make those sad and true admissions. What that tells me is this: These people don’t care about me. They don’t care who has the last word. They don’t remember me. They could care less what is happening in my life, and they don’t care to make amends. They’re done with everything that has anything to do with me and it hits a sore spot in me, and the reason that sore spot is there, is because of a lack of closure. It’s because of a lack of everything. It’s because I’ll never be able to say what I want. Because I’m afraid to. I’m afraid of the meanness, the backlash, the goodbyes, the finality of it all. I’m afraid of what I so desperately want, and I don’t even know why, or what makes me afraid.

At the end of the day, all I ever want to do is pour my heart out. To write long, heartfelt and deep letters to the people who left me and wronged me and made me feel like an outsider, ugly, unworthy of love. And I want to tell them just how much that hurts to be kicked down into the dirt and stomped on after almost an entire decade of the best memories of my life. I want to but the reality is, it won’t make a difference. Because for closure to be closure, both parties have to meet halfway, join hands, shake, and walk away peacefully. And that’s something I am so, so, so willing to do for others. But others are so, so, so unwilling to do for me.

In my life I have known some of the best people and the best times and the best music and the best laughter anyone has ever known. And I’ve also known the terrors of sleeplessness, insomnia, anxiety, terror, sadness, hopelessness, and being completely and utterly isolated and alone. I’ve known the most embarrassing awkward moments. I’ve known how it feels to have an entire group of friends – your lifers, your go-tos, the people you thought once that you could count on for absolutely anything on earth, leave you in the dust with nothing and no one and totally shun you and treat you like popular high school girls would treat someone they arbitrarily decided they didn’t like. And that’s hard to deal with. It hurts and it sucks and it breaks my heart and despite all the good things in my life, I’m not going to pretend that everything is 10000% fine and that I’m better off without those who I felt like I needed once, who I got milkshakes and fries with and walked down Whyte Avenue with laughing our asses off after an amazing night of midnight madness vintage clothes shopping.. those things are a huge part of who I am. And to make the decision to rip them from the fabric of my tapestry and trash the mangled threads… matters too.

But without closure, what else can I do but that?

Saturday Reflections.

Today, I was thinking about Halloween in the past. I remember that time that my friends and I all went on on actual Halloween which was a Tuesday or something, and there was actually nobody else around, costumed or otherwise, except for us. And as we walked home from a quiet and kind of anti-climactic going-out-on-Halloween experience, we saw these two groups of people, both dressed as Tetris blocks, across the street from each other, dumbfounded that they’d happened to see each other. One of them shouted out, “WHAT ARE THE ODDS!?” and back then in my second year of undergrad, that was a story we remembered for weeks.

And maybe friendships are just a series of interconnected stories, an anthology of when I knew you and you knew me, and these poignant, funny, odd little moments still live in both of us, and we still tell them from time to time. And even if we’re no longer in each other’s lives, those moments are the very fine, very brittle threads that keep us interconnected anyways, even if we feel angry.

The People Who Leave Us.

When people are no longer in our lives they leave holes of one kind or another. The greatest hole is nostalgia. Looking back on the memories and marks of those who are no longer in our lives is a kind of pain that is both relieving and that reminds us of a hole that was there, that might never be filled again.

But so what if a hole can’t be filled? Holes will always be filled with something else. As long as we’re open to allowing those holes to be filled, then the former filling of them was just something lost and gone. And it doesn’t matter anymore what was there.

It’s impossible to imagine my life without the person I’m with. It’s difficult to picture who I was before I was so full, inspired, and before I strived so much for success in my new career. But there was a time when my reality – the reality I liked, and the reality I didn’t, were completely unrecognizable to the person I am now. Something else was fulfilling. The people I knew were different. The life I lived, my motivations, my dreams, my daily life, my cares – they were completely different and I loved that time. I did. I look at those years as funny and memorable and full of the kinds of joys you can only share with friends in your twenties when your dream was to be a bohemian artist, before you learned horrible truths and everything became complicated and serious.

People left me. Change left holes. And then in time, with work and effort and overcoming failure and feeling like a loser, those holes were filled. I had new dreams and new goals and new exciting things to live for in ways I didn’t expect. The people who leave us are ghosts that serve as important reminders that things are constantly changing. The people who leave us are a part of our history, our tapestry. They once helped us discover who we were, so we could become who we are now. The people who leave us, left us. They’re gone. They’re not coming back.

And it’s fine.