It’s been almost a year now, and I’m still not over it. Or her.

The gist of what’s happened to me is this: after half a decade of being the best friend I knew how to be to a friend who had taken a turn for the worse, I was just tired.

Depression is a cancerous thing. It first targets that place inside of you that is the source of all caring, and then it attacks. It is an attack that is as slow as it is silent. It eats at your resolve to push forward and thieves your depths of even a single plume of desire. Once the brighter emotions are immobilized, you get locked into a paralysis of doing. And then you live in this state of being. Existing. Unaware that for some time, your heart has been filled with nothing. By the time are aware of this, you realize that your own thoughts have conspired against you, and that they have taken away every pocket of hope you had hidden inside yourself for rainier days.

As soon as you even think about wanting out, your mind is wired tell you why you can’t ever and why you’ll always stay just.

Knowing that this was happening to her, too, perhaps I could’ve felt a little more compassion towards and a little less anger over the demise of our friendship. But you know, when you’re stuck deep inside that well that nobody’s even aware of, it’s hard. For those who’ve never suffered depression, it’s like it takes all the juice out of your batteries to even fathom a feeling.

Whenever I managed to break from the doldrums that threatened to end me, all I could hear was her misery on the other end of the line: Why couldn’t she find a boyfriend. Why wasn’t she paid more. How come she couldn’t find a better job. And the group therapy? Wasn’t even working. It was people complaining about problems that didn’t even matter. Or people with problems so bad, it made her feel like her problems weren’t even problems to begin with.

I got it.

Not the way in which she saw things, but I knew what it was to wake up and find that the once-friendly world has turned hostile. Especially against one’s most private of aspirations. And I don’t even think we were alone in this. After all, maybe this depression epidemic is nothing more than a rite of passage for every Millenial who comes to the realization that her ideals and the reality of her circumstances can no longer coexist.

Anyway, something of a mental break happened to me there, that day, when we were hanging out.

And that was that.

We were friends one moment, and not in an instant.

I’ll not go into detail, but just know that the strength of my ideals behind the concept of BFFs could no longer handle the strain of unkindness and misery anymore.

I spoke out.

She felt insulted.

Outside of work, we’ve not spoken more than two words to one another since.

There is a lot more power behind anger than there is behind depression. With depression you hide, deep, beyond a place even you can reach. With anger, you are alive with hate, and feel all kinds of motivated to do a multitude of things you just simply could not when you were way down deep and under. That is the power of being angry. Or livid. Or even jealous. Of what? Oh, I suppose of her seeming okay-ness with her life now that I was no longer a part of it.

Bitch didn’t even seem to care that I cared.

Inside, I was riding strong on my high horse of self-righteousness, ever determined to show my ex-friend that her way of living life was wrong and that my instinctive reaching up towards the light was right. And my cavalry of reasons rode on right behind me off the momentum of pure indignation: I had been the one who fought for my company to hire her, I was the one who rewrote her terrible résumé, the one who would put in extra time to help her adjust to her new job, the one to pitch in and help her behind the scenes when she wasn’t looking, the one to stay by her side after an unexpected accident, the one who was still there after her outlook on the world had soured, the one who spent hours researching activities that would be easy on her rehabilitating foot, the one who was so hypersensitive and mindful of her growing discomfort with strangers, the one who gave her regular pep talks in a naïve effort to get her to want to get better.

Somewhere along this prolonged march of self-righteous indignation, the ex-friend had become a living symbol of what my depression wanted me to become: a cesspool of unhappiness, an unmotivated and stubborn blight on ideals.

Childish feelings of hurt and anger now pull me out of bed and push me toward making and keeping new friends, taking chances on a fledgling freelance career, and risking rejection to find something genuine and true.

Hm. Perhaps a trace of my Millenial idealism has not yet left me.

But, overall, it’s a pretty ugly feeling to have — hating a person so much that I actually go out of my way to rub it in her face how happy I am. For example, I will consciously take personal phone calls in front of her so that she can overhear me flirting with a new beau, making plans with a mutual friend without her, agreeing to a new and exciting project that will pull my career forward.

At this point, I am living the hell out of my life to show and to prove to the ex-friend that her way is not the way to live. That it is barely a way to even exist. My recent attempts at living — the projects, the pitching, the aggressive dating, and the slow and dogged crawl out of financial debt have mostly been fueled by this hot feeling to just murder all her chances at happiness by making her deathly jealous of my projection of how better off I am without her.

I want to say that an even nobler part of me exists in my unconscious and wants for her to feel hot with jealousy so that she, too, can propel herself out of her depression — but I disappoint my ideals in discovering that I am not, when it comes down to it, noble. Not at all. I just want her to taste the bitter and the sour that I cannot help drinking whenever I think about her. Hell hath no fury like a BFF scorned, and I just want to see her suffer. Because it will feel so delicious when it happens.

Mind you, this all goes against my most deeply-seated beliefs to feel this way, to want for her to feel as terrible as I do, but I just can’t turn away from it. The thing is, the ugliness of my all-consuming hate is the most powerful motivation I have to keep my head above a depression that still lurks in my system. Right now, it is the truest and realest feeling I know. And beneath the hatefulness I reach for is a pain, so bright and so sharp that I can’t even breathe when it strikes without warning.

So even when I pretend that I don’t care and play the role of the crisp and efficient ice queen in the office, I hate that I know that so much of me is pretending, and that so much of me has changed because of this rift between us. The former prayer-centered, spiritual seeker who struggled to meditate the blues away has transformed herself into a vindictive and jealous bitch who cannot sleep until the ex-friend demonstrates that she is, indeed, sorry that I am no longer a part of her life.

Where the pain comes from, I know: a single iota of faith that survives and believes that somewhere beneath the misery, her soul is still alive and there, that she still exists, and that she, too, misses what we once had.

I hate her. I miss her. I hate that I miss her. And, anyway, I can’t turn back, because I want to survive this. You know, the being tired of being tired. Because I hope for remission. Because I really want to live before I die, and not the other way around.