Friendship is not a competition, but some people make it so.  

For the past three years, the death count of lives I’ve lost has surpassed 20 and I just stopped counting after that.  I didn’t want to turn those lives into a statistic.  Each life lost was a stab in my heart, and it never got easier.  I dealt with it by just getting busier.  

One of my besties, Sezar, left this earth  on Thursday, December 14 of this year, 2023.  Had I written this entry a few days ago, one would be reading a vessel of despair, guilt, and self-hatred for not having checked in as much as I should have, for inadvertently turning him into a footnote of my life, for forgetting about him when my life made a turn for the busy. 

I heard about his passing on Facebook after having gone to the dentist at 7 AM Friday morning for two root canals on top of having to deal with some urgent server issues at work that I had to take care of. That morning came in three’s, and after hearing about his death I was actually quite calm.  I thought, wow, I”m ok and I am getting used to this finally.  I’m not sad.  I started questioning if I really even cared.  I texted two other besties that were close to let them know he was gone.  One took the day off work and we hung out.  I didn’t even cry.  He said we were still in shock, and I brushed it off.

Another friend of mine, S, was not talking because of some drama a while back that I tried to sweep under the rug because I didn’t want to disparage her image in hopes that we would repair our friendship.  I kept the drama quiet, but she admitted that she had told people about it.  

The drama, if you’re wondering, had to deal with her pulling some kind of Single White Female bullshit on me months ago, only she wasn’t single and she wasn’t white.  She had, for some time, talked about how unhappy she was in her marriage because her spouse did not go out with her, so I tried to fill in that part of her life by inviting her to the goth clubs.  It was a new scene for her, and she loved it.  She talked about how she and her spouse had an open relationship, and how she was looking for a partner.  I laughed and thought she was all talk, and joked that she watched too many episodes of Sister Wives.  

I had to slow down and eventually stop the club scene because I was taking a class after work, I was working on the garden, and I had my own 9 to 5 to deal with.  Basically, I had a lot on my plate.  She wasn’t happy about that and so began asking my husband.  She accused me and him of being joined at the hip.  She pried into our finances, asking if we had our own accounts, and she disclosed that she and her husband had separate accounts so if they were ever to separate it would be easy. I didn’t volunteer any information because it was none of her business. 

She started filling my husband’s head with ideas of me being a controlling wife that had to give him permission each time he went out, but this was far from the truth because there had been times he had gone out without me, and I may be bossy, but I am far from controlling.  

Well, I took a break and we all went to the club.  We came back late and I crashed.  A few days later she was asking permission to date my husband, and even tried to push her own on me.  I said I wasn’t into that.  She told me that she and him made out when I was asleep.  My husband admitted they had shared a kiss and nothing more. I felt a flashback of betrayals in my past hit me with such force I was solemnly defeated.  After the shock I tried to pretend everything was good, but when I came to my senses I only felt anger.  I yelled at my husband who turned into both a child and a wall.  I demanded a divorce, but I didn’t really want that.  I told myself he didn’t cross the line that deep, and so I worked on forgiveness, and then we were off to France.  I told her that I needed a break and she responded by giving me a half-assed apology where she shifted the blame on him and then deflected on me, got angry at me for yelling at her kid on his birthday party which had nothing to do with what had happened, then accused me of ruining her own marriage.  I ended up blocking her on Facebook just so she could create another account to give me another half-assed apology saying she was sorry, but… And in it she accused me and my husband of having manipulated and triangulated her.  Wow.

Fast forward to the death.  We were a circle of besties back in my City College days.  When he was on life support she was there, and she didn’t call me.  She didn’t call any of his cirle of besties.  He couldn’t call because he didn’t have possession of his phone.  When I got news of his passing, I set aside my quibble with her and called her the next day to forgive her because I knew that was something he didn’t want.

When I spoke to her she blamed the family for me and some others not being there for him.  She said that the family wanted to keep it private, and that they only allowed her to see him. They were closer because they once dated, and she was closer to the family than any of us.  She told me that he was angry with them.  She told me that she had told him what happened between us ( I am sure she gave her version of the story), and that he had defended me.  I told her I forgave her.

The next day I went to a holiday party at her home and I heard from her friend that she had called her to visit him on life support, and her friend was sad that she couldn’t make it because she had to work.  This is when I realized that she could have called me, but out of spite because we were fighting, she chose not to.  This was when I felt another pain in my heart.  Also, that night, his mom spoke like S was a savior and star, giving a speech on how close they were and how she had known him the longest, erasing my own history with her son and forgetting I was there before S was in the picture.  S spoke of how she was able to be there at the end for him, as if she was the only one who was there for him, and I hated myself for not being there for him.

The next day I went down a rabbit hole, full of so much emotion that I had a breakdown on Facebook.  Working on forgiveness , I invited her to a Celebration of Life that I was holding the weekend of his birthday, and then she told me she was having one on that same weekend so she set it up for the day after mine at Crown Point, a place where she loves to go.  Last time we gathered there, he got lost on the way and he hated that place.  It was almost like this was her party, her bestie, her grief. I feel like I lost two friends in this story.

Friendship is not a competition.  I confess that I indavertently felt pulled into a competition I never intended to join. Forntunately, I am a sensinble being and just had to wait until my senses kicked in. I am not a God or a saint. I can’t be there for my friends all the time, but that doesn’t mean I love them less.

I am still working on forgiving S, but I understand our bond can never relaim the depth we once shared.

“Good Friends care for each other, Close Friends understand each other, but True Friends stay forever; beyond words, beyond distance, beyond time.” -Anonymous