This post is cross-posted to my other blog, across between and beyond. Read here or on my other site.

to the friend I lost

We met in preschool. I came home one day and told my mother I wanted a playdate with “the girl with one eye.” You wore an eyepatch because of a required corrective surgery. The eyepatch made you an original, but it was your gentle nature that made me want to play with you. Nothing seemed to rustle you, but you were not a push-over either. Like the wind, you were quietly powerful, a force always there, unassuming but oxygenating.

We skated on Sabrina Lake near your house, slender pyramids of hemlock on the shore. Inside on a rainy day, we helped your mother and grandmother hand-wind yarn to ready it for knitting. If it happened to be a Friday when I was over, your mother would be behind us in the kitchen kneading dough for hand-made pizzas. Your home was a warmth, a solace, a place where no one ever seemed to get upset. Your dad had a sense of humor that we found both eye-rolling and belly-laugh-making. He used to bellowingly mis-sing the lyrics to the Huey Lewis and the News song, “I Want a New Drug” as “I want a new truck…”

After preschool, I went on to private school, you to public school. We continued to play on the same town soccer teams, but we didn’t reconnect as friends until 7th grade when we both went to the same independent school. Throughout middle and high school, there was a small group of friends who seemed to maneuver between the popular group, the nerdy group, the athletic group, the theater kids etc without straining friendships or upsetting the social pecking order. It was this group of which we were a part, you as the one who moved with the most ease and still such a quiet soul. To me, it was a mystery. How did you win friends amongst all when it seemed you barely raised your voice? I too was quiet, shy, but perhaps my fear was too tangible to others. I was friends with most everyone, but only because of the group of which I was a part. On my own, well, I was on my own.

You were only in your late twenties when your mother died, hit by a car while out walking, the driver blinded by the setting sun. I was home from graduate work in California and able to come to her wake. In your unimaginable grief, in between teary greetings and weary listening, even so you somehow seemed lightened to see me. I did not know why. I could bring you nothing, not consolation nor comfort, though of course I tried, stumbling through some muck of wordage spoken in an attempt to convey how wonderful your mother was, how sorry I was for you, for the loss.

I studied on and on and you married and had two little girls. When my first son was 1, after a failed relationship, I moved in with my mother and you bought our old house which was too big for her after her divorce. At a local kid’s gym, I ran into you one day with your newborn son. As your two older girls ran rampant around on the play mats, you turned to me: “I am so overwhelmed,” you pleaded to me, looking exhausted and slightly daunted. It is the only time I recall you looking shaken off of your solid foundation.

The years passed. We texted now and then. We talked about getting together for coffee but the time kept slipping. The intent felt real though. You texted me once when you found an old article in our local paper’s archives that mentioned your mother and her role in creating a town quilt years ago. I responded: “Aww, that’s so awesome. Your mom was a gem. I miss her presence in the world.”

I had two more children, much younger than your youngest. I saw you in the grocery store while pregnant with my second and you told me I was brave. We talked again about getting together.

I drove past your house, my old house, last winter as I was showing my children where I used to live, attempting to find meaning for the long drives throughout the pandemic; you and your husband stood outside greeting friends and then graciously ushering them inside. I felt ashamed. I saw you again recently, out running. I felt sure that you saw me, but you said nothing and made no move to acknowledge me. Perhaps you didn’t see me.

This was the first year I didn’t send you a holiday card. It felt painful, a loss I was already coming to terms with, though I wasn’t sure why. But I had my hunches–the differences in social position, in marital status. Despite my pride in my children, I felt myself an embarrassment to those like you, married, solid, comfortable. Your card turned up a day or so before Christmas. I felt heartened and drove with my middle child over to hand deliver a card to your mailbox. On the back, I wrote that I hoped to catch up sometime soon. I followed up with a text as my last name and address were different than what you had sent on your card. Perhaps you were not aware. You responded in apology (not necessary), and wished me well, mention of getting together conspicuously absent.

When does a friendship disappear? Does it slowly dissolve into the fog of the past? Or is it broken, shattered somewhere, at some moment, the clarity of its one-time hopes jagged pieces on the ground? If the latter, I never saw it, I never felt the wound. Perhaps I was the wounder. Maybe it was just lost to time, busyness, and change…or maybe somehow I lost you through negligence or inattention like beautiful-looking fruit rottening on the underside, undetected to the eye as you pass its lovely veneer day in and day out.

to the friend I left

I left you so many times abandonment was our daily bread.

You arrived a few days after me in Wallaby Creek, Australia. But you knew the valley. It was your second or maybe third summer there. I had just begun to get to know the other study volunteers, all of them biology students. I had a newly minted Bachelor of Arts…in anthropology. I was the black sheep, not just for my lack of biological background, but for my daily runs up the dirt road to the main highway and back–these workouts considered strange, useless, and wasteful of energy by my fellow volunteers.

Perhaps you found me intriguing. I couldn’t say. I certainly didn’t find myself as such; in fact, I couldn’t really fathom why anyone would be interested in me…as interested as you were becoming. We took a walk a few days after your arrival to search for a bower and, in our winding discussion, you asked me if I believed in God. It immediately turned me off to you. Were you a devout follower of some form of Christianity or some other religion? My mind was smaller back then. As I got to know you better, I learned of your curiosity about religion more broadly. You recommended and I read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.

We talked of all things, not just religion. Slowly, I began to know about you. You were dating an older woman who tended towards dramatic displays of jealousy. More than once, she had threatened suicide at the thought of the relationship ending. Your favorite nephew was sick with cancer. You spoke of him as one would speak of his own son. You would have been the best kind of father–attentive, fun, supportive. You were gentle, intellectual, quietly full of high expectations, silly and childlike, and gentle. Yes, gentle and reassuring like the ocean shushing the shore on and on. Gentle in a way that I have not encountered since, except in my own younger brother.

There was a slow, unhurried unfolding to being with you, marked by moments of intensity, a geologic compression and expansion of moments into an era where I was reconstructed into time beyond the limits of my own perspective. We left each other notes all over the valley, finding some, not finding others I would guess. They were episodic whispers, wisps of paper in the wind, but to me each one boomed with your mellifluous voice and arcing laughter cascading down from the red river gum trees.

When I returned weeks before you to the US, we exchanged long letters. You addressed them to me as “Blue-Eyes” and didn’t sign your name as that was obvious, rather just ending with “I love you.” One of your letters read simply:

You sent me a recording you took of the ‘Wallaby Creek evening chorus’: a menagerie of tree frogs, bell birds, koala hums, and cicadas. The love between us was so pure it would break your heart. Some kisses, often nights sleeping together in your little tent, but merely quietly curved up close one against the other like strata of the earth fearing only the slow erosion of being.

I visited you down in DC when you returned, your tiny apartment almost filled with your Christmas tree. I had brought you a gift, a hand-sewn small red bird, an ornament for the tree. As I lay on the couch at night, I watched the tiny beads sewn over each stitch catch the fading light. We went to the National Gallery and I tried to understand us dressed nicely in an art gallery rather than sweaty and disheveled, hiking up the valley betwixt eucalyptus trees searching for bowers.

You moved, I moved. When we were not physically close, which was most of the time, we spoke on the phone. When I was in Santa Barbara and you in New York, we spoke nightly for months. As someone who despises talking on the phone, this alone was a triumph. The conversations were as easy as waking up, as comfortable as falling asleep. Years added on, and you would have thought you faded, but you remained at the center of my being. Your voice, even now, twenty years after I met you, sounds clearly in my head. You were always the one. Once, a million eons ago, you wrote a song about me. I recall one line, “is she the one?” It turns out I wasn’t for you, not for lack of trying. Life just didn’t allow it. I drove to upstate New York to see you when I was teaching high school in Massachusetts. At dinner, you broke into tears saying that every girlfriend you ever had had always felt me in the background. You said I had always been the one. I was and I wasn’t. I left this visit feeling we might finally fit–in time and place and being–that our hands might reach out and clasp gently together. When I got home, though, you wrote me an email describing how your previous girlfriend had ended a pregnancy without consulting you and you needed time to heal. By the time you felt ready and reached back out, I was with someone else…a wildly wrong someone else, but I didn’t know that in the glow of present attentions. And by the time that didn’t work out and I was pregnant, I called you not knowing what to do. You didn’t tell me either way, but just cautioned me to try to think forward to who I might be and what regrets I may or may not have later. And then soon you were engaged. And though I have tried to stay in touch, to hold tight to the friendship, you don’t respond anymore.

I was young once…and I was cruel, cruelty stemming from fear, stemming from discomfort with myself and anyone that might give credence to that self. I remember you coming to visit my parents’ second home by a lake in New Hampshire. This was not long after our meeting in Australia, before you needed to give me another chance. I pushed you away, not coming to visit you at night, not embracing you with warmth. Before we left, you wandered down alone to the dock. I found you there, arms clasped around your knees, reddened eyes, the lachrymose notes of your voice unusually inaudible.

What had I done to you? My own shame at being anything to anyone was a contagion, I recognized painfully. I could not turn back from that moment, even though we did, even though we healed and reconnected and loved each other deeply there on after. I could not turn back because I had left you…and I did not know, could not have known, that timing and pathways and distance would never allow us to be together again. We, the only us there was to be, had fossilized into the valley where we met and would ever remain.

to the friend i lack

You see me hanging back at the school playground and wave me over to the bench where the other moms sit. Your eyes meet mine as you schooch over to make room, your smile assuring me I belong. As you comfortably talk with the other moms, you put your hand on mine and mention to them my “brilliant blog.” You tell them they just must read it. Nods of interest fan out. Somehow I am not embarrassed. You have normalized and elevated me all at once.

Or maybe you…check in on me after having my third child. You bring me easy-to-reheat dinners with little clean-up and take the older two out to play in the backyard so the baby and I can rest. When my anxiety kicks in, you immediately yet non-judgementally urge me to reach out to my therapist. You make sure I get out for walks and fresh air. You tell me the stupidest jokes to make me laugh. You answer the phone when I call at odd times, always willing to listen.

Or maybe you… text me seeing if I am free for a walk. I mention the little one’s nap schedule, the eldest’s resistance to going on walks anymore. ‘Easy,’ you text back and have your husband pick up my eldest for a playdate while patiently waiting for my daughter to nap and finish her bottle. You have a new route to show me. You cannot imagine how you have lived in this town for so long and never known about so many of the trails. We set off for this unknown and I find myself talking on and on. Far too much. When I realize and apologize effusively, you brush it off saying you love hearing about my life, you want to hear about my life.

Or maybe you…invite me to the small dinner party you are having with a few other couples. It doesn’t bother you that I am the only single person there. At the same time, you are aware that position comes with some discomfort and make sure to include me in conversation or invite me into the kitchen for assistance when I seem a bit lost.

Or maybe you…listen when I talk about my back pain, how long it has been going on, how difficult it is making everything from work to movement to sleep to parenting. You do more than listen. You text me later having checked in with a local PT clinic to let me know they will do home-visit massage; you tell me what times they are available and let me know you would be willing to watch the kids if I am not free.

Or maybe you…remember my birthday. You don’t just send a text like everyone else, including my immediate family. You arrange for a small box of specialty skincare products to arrive at my door in the morning. You take me out for lunch, aware of my food intolerances and preferences. You arrange for a sitter, that I already know and have vetted, to come that evening so that I can go to a 90 minute restorative yoga class. And you ask me what I would like to do with you the following weekend to continue to celebrate–a movie, symphony, theater–whatever it is, you will arrange for it.

Or maybe you…work with me to organize a joint family vacation, our kids being at similar enough ages. You cover the additional cost beyond what I can afford and manage to do so without making me feel like a charity case. My kids have the best time because you find meaningful and fun activities for all of them and there is such joy in the shared time, within the village you create for us.

Or maybe you…sit with me after my mother has died. You are not afraid to bathe in the soak of grief, the way it spreads, the way it insidiously asks of all of us: what it time? what is purpose? what is connection? You hold my hand, you hold me. You ask nothing of me. You talk when it is clear I want to talk and you are silent when it is clear I cannot. You know that presence is enough, is more than enough, is the required balm when death whispers close.

Or maybe you…let me help you. You accept a bassinet that I never used when you become unexpectedly pregnant with a third. You call me the morning after a fight with your husband that has caused a deep rift. You ask me for advice and you listen when I make attempts to respond. You know that friendship only works when we both build the bridge. You don’t just let me help you; you need me just as I need you.

You are the one who always listens to me. You make me feel special, known, connected…valued. You laugh with me and find it easy to accept my foibles. You talk with me about the heavier things in life: meaning, time, relationships, sacrifice, loss. You allow me to be me and yet to grow and change into the me I become. You do so with grace, with generosity, with compassion. Rather than feeling like I’ve known you forever, our friendship is a symbiotic being, paired in gentle mutual empathy.

to the friend i love

The strangeness of our friendship is the strangeness which defines the awkwardness of human connection. How does one connect to another? to any other? You delight in the questions life poses, accept the ambiguity it continually presents, move with grace amidst the losses and pain.

Our friendship began with emails, sharing the beauty and tragedy that words can provide to feeling, the feelings that slip between words and their inadequacy. We were on the same page, so to speak, sharing podcasts and articles and books, sharing anything that seemed to attempt to get at the essence of life or at least to ask the questions.

In all honesty, that was enough to make me love you. To find a fellow seeker, a pilgrim in this journey is a search unto itself. You were that…and more, as it would turn out.

You have an interminable optimism, an ability to see light through the cracks in our brokenness and to continually share that with me. “You should put that on a t-shirt” you joked when I texted you after being violently ill during the first few weeks postpartum with my second: ‘I am so glad it is not yesterday.’ We often seemed to be hovering on the same wavelength.

You are always there for a phone call, the listening ear and support that goes above and beyond. You support my journeys–to have children, to explore different career options, to explore life…to write.

Most of all, it is your simple consistency that makes me love you. That and your forgiveness, your desire to look forward, to let us be fallible, faulting, slipping, falling…to lie on the ice with me, the cold burning through both of our backs. Though you need not be there, you will sit with me anyway, as long as necessary, even when cracks begin to spread, even when depths threaten to swallow us up.

What is a true friend? There can be lists of definitions, of qualities required, of generosities shown, but perhaps the truest test is simply to stay, to be there, to remain with me no matter the distance, no matter the time, no matter the ask. The truest expression of friendship may be as Ivan Turgenev once wrote: “We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”