Growing Apart

Losing a friend is like losing family. It hurts in the beginning, rips your heart through as if it were a break up. Except that with a friend, it is never a true break up. You still call each other up – in the beginning it’s a habit, then it is out of some kind of nostalgia, after which you grab the instances when you still see a ray of hope, and eventually, things turn formal and stiff. That is when you know you have lost a friend, that is when first it hurts and then you just learn to get along your way without the ‘best friend’.

Somewhere between growing up and getting married, having a kid and running a house, I lost one very close friend.  She once told me that a best friend is a really childish concept and that as we grow older, we should understand that. I think it was a very polite way of telling me that we were done.  But I think the concept of a best friend doesn’t grow old as we do. 

I am a big believer in having a rock solid pillar of support. I would like to imagine I can be that to someone too. In this case, I may have faltered as much as she. But I still feel a twinge of sadness every time I see a fleeting activity on facebook, I feel a twinge of anger when I don’t quite understand what happened, I still feel a twinge of envy when I see another friend from college bond much more with her and advertise that fact quite often on a public forum. And I hate that I actually measure my words and think about what I am saying when I talk to her.  I miss my best friend but with a kind of latent anger that I don’t understand myself. 

I see these pairs of women - everywhere – on television and movies, in books and in coffee shops, in weddings and in conversations. I see them amongst people I know. I spot the sheer comfort they share, the way their lives are open to each other, the fact that there is no need to hide and project. And I miss having that. 

No, I don’t think one can entirely blame a marriage that changed a life, or a city one shifted out of, or a baby being born. Best friends stick together – that is what they are supposed to do – it’s a part of the job description. And me – the eternal sucker for this best friend business – I am just grateful that my closest school friend and I are still the same – I am just happy that I wasn’t careless enough to let go of old friends to make new ones. 

I like a few things about myself and one of them is loyalty – I still have a bunch of shining stars in my own little personal sky and I haven’t lost touch because I temporarily lost a number or missed out on a phase of someone’s life. I am incredible lucky to carry forward these friends with me from each phase of my life – school, college, workplace and my second masters. But I am also immensely sad that one of the brightest stars faded out. 

But sometimes losing a friend is a learning lesson – it teaches you to let go. Sometimes it’s a hopefully hopeless juncture – you hope things will be the same though you know they won’t. Sometimes it’s a lesson in self improvement – you will bitch about it because it is cathartic and then you will feel like shit about it and promise not to do it again. And sometimes it is just what it is – it is a realization that it wasn’t that strong in the first place. 

Growing apart is an excuse. Yes, it happens. But it shouldn’t happen.  And if it has happened then it isn’t called growing apart, it is a heart wrenchingly sad break-up, it’s like losing a part of your family. It happens, yes – but we learn to live with it.