You said you’d never go away.
From Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson.
Today’s newsletter is going to be a little sad I suppose. It’s about growing apart and it’s the one concept I have hated for all my life.
When you’re young and making pacts of forever with your friends, it doesn’t hit you until you start adulthood that these friends are now just a patchwork quilt of memories. It’s hard to be happy about love lost, so you can imagine the heartbreak of friendships lost. Sometimes you don’t even realise you’ve drifted apart from someone until you take a step back and look at the friendship. Sometimes it’s deliberate, but sometimes it just happens.
Sometimes, though, I wish it didn’t have to be like that. The kind of loss you feel over lost friends is so intense, that the desire to patch up takes over any other rational thought. What are you supposed to do with all this love? What are you supposed to do with all the forevers you crossed your pinkies over? Where do you keep all this love?
Over the years, I’ve looked at the number of people I’m close to and the number I’ve lost contact with. Sometimes the latter makes me very sad, because I wish I could go back then and be a good friend.
Good friend, bad friend. We’ve all been everything — but sometimes it takes a lot in you to not reach out to someone. Even if you were to put your hand out, no one would take it.
It’s not easy. How am I supposed to go about this? Why is there no handbook? It’s hard to digest that you just aren’t friends with someone anymore. I think of this passage from this article titled, “The Art of Loving and Losing Female Friends” by Rachel Vorona Cote:
This wasn’t unusual for me. I have never fought gracefully with women. From the earliest, I felt any misstep on my part carried an elephantine weight. Both shame and pride would burn in my stomach. I was a wretched friend, I would think to myself. No, I was obviously misunderstood. Regardless, I was going to lose her.
I was going to lose her — that was always my fear. My trespass didn’t matter. It was less what I’d done wrong than my paranoia and neediness that would inevitably weary my friend. I would take her departure as a bitter loss, but also as a personal failure. In my adolescence, when my heart thumped to the rhythms of social acceptance, foundering in friendship seemed like the biggest of all recipes for disaster.
The article felt like a punch in the gut, but this specific paragraph in the beginning had me crying my out. When I started my first year in college, for some reason I felt like I would never make friends. Ever. And at every point I felt like I was making a mistake.
Flashback to 2014 where I felt like my entire world stopped when my friends and I started fighting. I couldn’t say it — but the eventual fall out in 2015 ended being one of the losses I still blame myself for to this day. “I should’ve said this,” or “I should’ve fought for it more”, and even today, it takes everything in me not to fall apart at the thought of it.
in evermore, taylor swift croons a particular lyric, “i replay my footsteps on each stepping stone,
trying to find the one where I went wrong”
Every footstep in my life felt like I was only walking backwards and not forward. Was it me? Was it them?
Growing apart is natural. And no matter how much you hate it, you can’t stop it from happening. Some friendships last, some don’t. I can’t… say that’s okay because it doesn’t feel okay. It’s just something I’ve learnt to live with, against my own will.
If I could, I’d write everyone from my past a letter but it would just say: “I’m sorry.” Not because I have nothing to say, but because no matter what I say, it’s not going to bring them back. Things will never be the same again and I have to be okay with that.
One way I patch myself up when I feel this way is to remember the good times. I often have the overwhelming urge to go back in time and freeze these moments, but I suppose one of life’s greatest lessons is that sometimes you have to let go of the hand you’re holding onto. It could be hurting them, and it could be hurting you.
This is something I know a lot of us struggle with. But I always hope that I never foster ill-feelings (unless they really hurt me) for anybody I have had to let go of. I can’t be angry for each misstep from each side all the time. Maybe the anger will simmer down and “you said you’d never go away” would turn into “I’m so glad you are in my life, in some form or the other.”
We don’t have to make peace, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Easy they come, easy they go, Taylor once said. And that’s something we’ll have to deal with.
Here are a few more snippets/poems/whatever else I could find on this topic:
“Love isn’t always magic. Sometimes it’s just melting. Where it’s black and blue. Where it hurts the most.”
Andrea Gibson, from The Madness Vase; “Maybe I Need You”
“Isn’t there / always something we want / more than our own happiness? / A pull toward the Fall. / Haven’t we all loved too much?”
Danusha Laméris, from The Moons of August; “Apples”
“Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that.”
James Joyce, Exiles: A Play In Three Acts
“We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning — clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again. I awakened from my trance state and was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness had become the order of the day. I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood. Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love. Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.”
Bell Hooks, All About Love
and to end this with a little bit of consolation,
“There is nothing to be done but to go ahead with life moment by moment … try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside of me.”
Katherine Mansfield, Letters of Katherine Mansfield.
Sending love and warmth your way,
Amulya.
