WHAT IT MEANS WHEN I GRIEVE FOR YOU: TO BREAK UP WITH A FRIEND
I. Denial
Feeling: Technically, you never left. I can still feel you, relentlessly intertwined in muscle-memory movements. You linger on my fingertips when I open my messages, and your contact haunts my call history. Your name sits on my tongue at night. My eyes fill with tears that form waves and crash onto my ocean bed cheeks. In their wake, I find you, knowing it’s the closest I can be to holding you. I cannot touch you like I used to, hand in hand as we danced at parties. I cannot trade stories with you like I used to, delicate late night confessions resting between us with ease. I cannot remember the past year without thinking of you, of all the hours you filled utterly and completely.
Fact: We are no longer friends. Your sadness is no longer mine to languish over, and your joy is not for me to celebrate. We are no longer friends, but technically you never left. You are tangible and present and real in every way except for the ones that count.
Fact: I’ve called you after each time I had sex. More often than not, I also trekked to your room, taking shortcuts to your dorm, so we could dissect the night like Watson and Holmes. I’ve called you the moment brisk midnight air hit my face after being cooped up in a Grad Center single that wasn’t mine, my hair still tousled and my breath shaky. You were there when every first became a second and a third.
Fact: The last time I had sex, I called you. He had just left my room, and my bed sheets were still undone. The used condom that sat in my garbage can seemed to steal all the oxygen in my vicinity. The moment was fresh and my emotions were ruby red, rubbed raw, and I wanted nothing more in the world than to be caressed by your voice, soothing every confusion and wound. So I called. While we talked, you had me on speaker as someone else listened in. I handed you my secrets so easily, so neatly, and you packaged them up as an object to point and laugh at with someone else. You defiled our sacred, safe place until the streets I memorized as shortcuts to you became empty, concrete slabs that wind into nothing and lead nowhere, and I could spend an eternity measuring their distance and still never find the person I thought you were.
Feeling: You are my best friend, my love, strong and true and stable. I can depend on you when other lovers come and go, desecrating my bed only for the night. I miss you. It’s impossible for me to reconcile all that you’ve done and what you meant to me. It’s incongruous, an absurdist, terrible task. I can feel you in past Tinder conversations, in Instagram comments, in how Brown began to feel like home.
Feeling: You are my best friend, and technically you never left. I can feel you in everything, everywhere.
II. Anger
The night that I told you we couldn’t be friends anymore, I felt my bones splinter, my ribcaged heart falling through the slats. Today I will sweep up this smattering of degraded dust and rebuild my body into one of triumph. Parts of me are still an open wound (with hands that keep opening your messages), yet I will smile with daggered teeth. I will pretend that everything is perfectly fine, immaculate, pristine. I will laugh in public, my voice echoing across campus dining halls. I will socialize more. I will do everything I can to give the impression that I forgot all about you.
I want the way I speak to annoy you, and I want my words to grope at the walls of your brain. I hope my happiness is grating and that it makes you scratch your skin until my name is written on your body in giant, raging welts. I want to incite fear in your eyes when I wave hello in the halls, simply and freely. I hope what you did gets caught in your throat, that you cough and wheeze, like I did when I swallowed the truth about the person you’ve become.
If I am cruel, I want you to know why. I gave you trust, and you gave me venom.
III. Bargaining
When we get better, we can be friends again. I want to be friends with you again. I want for you to get better. You don’t handle change well, and the past year was brimming with it: I held your hand while you reminisced about being home, while you weighed questions about your sexuality, while you complained about how it felt to be poor on a campus that validates wealth as a measure of self-worth. I know that when you rated my attractiveness on a scale of one to ten and protested that I didn’t deserve my financial aid package, you spoke with polluted breath, riddled with insecurities and hardships that extend beyond me, that I won’t pretend to know or understand. There are things you need to work through, traitorous thoughts that impede your ability to be friends with me. I refuse to accept there is a version of you that’s inherently bad—I’d like to think that at a different time, perhaps in some other place, we could have worked. A product of misaligned fates.
Right now I am hurting, and I need time. My vision of you crumbled around me, shards of who you were tangling themselves in my hair. I am still dusting pieces of you from my shoulders, and I don’t know how to piece them back together again. I am learning how to trust again with bruised elbows and black-and-blue knees. I want to get better. I hope you do too.
IV. Depression
A non-exhaustive list of the places I’ve cried in the past month:
1. Pine Room (ADPHI, Goddard)
I entered under a lighthearted pretense and laughed about how strange it was that you spilled my secrets when we were supposed to be close. I called it “tea,” and I shrugged off your betrayal, burying my feelings under layers of nonchalance and insistence on being fine. When asked if I needed a hug, the precarious grip I desperately held on my emotions for you, for the situation, for everything, went lax, and I poured myself out onto the Pine Room table that night. I emptied myself onto dirty hardwood tables the way I used to empty my secrets onto you, the same way you complained about everything that I am. I cried into the arms of other friends, ones that don’t (couldn’t) replace you, cuddled under a blanket and sniffling while I thought of you.
2. My Dorm Room
I was doing my make-up and jamming to a playlist with a cringey name that I love. I was alone and comfortable and happy, and I was going to text you for dinner plans when I remembered that I couldn’t. I bawled into make-up brushes until my eyes puffed into golf-balls, one putt away from falling off my face. I remember that everything hurt: my eyes (red, swollen, begging to be closed), my chest (heavy, my heart beating through quicksand), my head (dehydrated, circuitous logic always leading back to you). I stopped listening to the playlist and let my sobs fill the silence that you left.
3. Fifth Floor, Page Robinson
It was the first time I cried at a therapy appointment. As I filled in my therapist (Would you tell another friend in this position that it was their fault? Why do you feel like you’re the one to blame? Let’s work through that), I picked at the scabs that held me together. Talking about you left a searing pain on the roof of my mouth. Your name, once sweet, turned sour. I cried because I didn’t know what else to do when love became pain, physical and fierce.
4. Room 16E, New Dorm
It was the morning after we talked, and I was at work. Someone asked if I was alright, and I was caught off guard by their sincerity, the care in their eyes, each word intentional, deliberate. I felt a familiar burn in my throat as I told them that I was fine, that I had a long night. Really, there was no space for me to breathe, to smile, to function, when your apology took up all of my room for existing (Were you sorry because you lied? Or because I found out?). I hurried down the hall so I could brush away my tears in peace and made my way outside to bask in the sunlight and start learning how not to need you.
V. Acceptance
I will try to care for myself the way I used to care about you. I am worthy of love, and I will dole it out to myself openly and unabashedly even if no one else will. I am flawed and often sad, but I am so much more than who I am in relation to you. I still miss you, and I still love you, my friend, and I am gentle, and kind, and hopeful, and these qualities are woven into my skin, so that not even you can take them from me. I am still hurting, but so what? It will pass, and I will be new again.
AUTHOR: Rose Diaz is in her second year at Brown and is constantly wondering why it rains so much in Providence. She’s studying literary arts and enjoys spending way too much time pursuing random bookstores in her small, completely unheard-of hometown of NYC.
ARTIST: Angie Kang