feb 13, 2012

it has been a great night in the realm of mending because, tonight, i spent hours and hours talking through a nearly lost friendship. it was on life support, this friendship. and neither of us know how it had gotten that bad. we have our theories, of course. we've both drawn and redrawn the map of how we got here from there. here being cold, awkward distance. there being the land of laughing and confiding and relying on each other and talking for four or more hours at a stretch.

you know those friendships that are so long-held and solid that you take for granted that anything could ever happen to them? and then some kind of unanticipated social disaster strikes, and you feel like one of those fools who stayed put while a hurricane ravaged the neighbourhood? that arrogance about untouchability. we've been friends for 12 years, though, so i guess some of that confidence is earned.

by the end of 2010, because of tensions that were rooted in our relationships, we had started to drift. by early 2011, there was a growing tension between us. by mid-2011, we barely spoke anymore. and sometime around the beginning of this year, we emerged bewildered from the rubble of our changed lives and both started feeling a need to reconnect. there was something that was starting to call to both of us. it was time.

we've been creeping back into each other's lives since then. brief conversations, a favour here and there, a spontaneous friend date where we kept the conversation topics light. both of us were afraid, you see, to admit just how much we missed each other. and when i say we missed each other, i mean that in two ways. we missed being in each other's lives, yes, but we also missed the other person being themselves enough to recognize in them the friend we had once known. it wasn't just a case of absence. we had both drifted so far from any recognizable version of ourselves that we didn't know how to relate. (like i said, 2011 was hell on wheels. loss and fuckery abounded.)

i went over to help her pack tonight. to pack up the kitchen she had shared with her recent ex, who is also a friend of mine. it felt really good to help her. she helped me out last week, as well. i was running behind in painting that i needed to get done for the set of my play, and she came over late with another friend to help me finish up the job. there was something communal in that, in us getting back to helping each other that helped the ice in our hearts start to melt.

getting her friendship back is the best kind of gift. all along, i've been wishing we had a map to figure out how to get back to where we used to be; to find the buried treasure...but i guess all we needed was to start the mending process and trust that we would find somewhere else. a new place of friendship that could hold all the change and lessons from the past year-and-a-half.