Holding Back

If I could have the conversation I want to have…

Before I begin, you know the gory details of what I have been through in my life and, while I know that you cannot REALLY relate (and I am glad for that), I wish you would try.  Please try to understand that when I say my heart breaks, I mean that it crumbles and bleeds and falls to the floor in agony; after all, it is pieced together with tape and Elmer’s glue as it is.  Please try to understand that when I say that I have fear, it registers in my brain and my body in just the same way as the gut wrenching fear registered when my mother snapped her gun belt before a beating; sharp and quick.  Please try to understand that when I say I love, I love selectively and deeply, into the marrow of my bones.

I have not meant to withhold my feelings and I am sorry that everything came out in a messy texted torrent yesterday, but I have been anguishing over our friendship for months.  Your news uncorked a shaken bottle of champagne.

I have seen a pattern in the way that you have been treating people, the very important and permanent people, in your life lately and it has made me examine my own role there too.  In the last year, and over the past few months especially, whenever one of them doesn’t serve some need within you, disagrees with you or your life choices, or has a difficult time coping with their lives and inarticulately comes to you needing support, you you spout about the incredible difficulties of your own life and the zero fucks you give and you turn them away.  It has seemed so easy for you to let them, to let your love for them, go.  Where do I, a mere friend, a temporary fixture of life, fit into that?  I haven’t been sure.

My heart has been breaking for you over your recent choices.  My heart has been breaking because you are knowingly setting yourself up for future heartbreak.  My heart has been breaking because your children will suffer their own heartbreak when you do.  My heart is breaking because they will take on your burdens and they will carry them for life, because that is what children do.  My heart has been breaking because my heart (and so many others) will break right along with yours when this house of cards crumbles around you.

I have feared that by expressing my concerns, you would reject me as you did them (and I was kinda right).  I have feared that our friendship is as disposable as those relationships appear to be to you.  I have these fears because of my own past, because of our past, and because you and your friendship mean so much to me.

I have felt a real void where the much needed presence of your friendship used to be.  I have needed you for some real nitty, gritty and unpretty lately, but you been aware of little but yourself.  I have needed your help surviving the surge in emotion, flashbacks, and hormones since surgery.  I have needed you when I regretted the decision.  I have needed you in my walk through the hurt of ending my relationship with my mother.  I have needed you, and you are a cheerleader when things are going well, but our textversations all seem to end when the topic turns toward anything of remotely difficult substance about me.  I have felt increasingly rejected and ignored by it, but I have presumed that it was only because you, too, were going through your own heartbreak and could not bear mine as well.

I have struggled with all of these feelings, but I was confident that they would pass as your fog lifted and you got back to your happy.

Then you tell me that you have been happy.  So, while I could understand and process your absence from my life because you are hurting, I could not (and cannot) fathom your absence because you are happy.  Is this our friendship?  Is this what it means to be your “best friend” now that you give zero fucks?  To be there to support you through your darkness, but only have you around when my life is comfortable for you?  Is my ability to be involved in your life contingent on my faking a smile?

I am happy that you feel happy, but I fear that it is a right now kind of happy.  I fear that you have been overtaken by the intensity and intoxication that right now happiness is made up of.  Right now happiness will deceive you (please don’t forget how it blinded you to a narcissistic monster just a year ago).  You let people in so freely and, while I admire that so much about you, I am afraid for the way that you appear to be chasing that right now happiness like a drug.  I fear it because an addiction to that right now happiness will destroy you like any other, my friend.  Like any drug, right now happiness can only fill the holes in your heart for so long before it leaves a wake of devastation in your life.

Don’t be mistaken, that right now happy can last for years.  You, however, deserve forever happiness.  My fear is that you are risking your forever happiness for temporary glee; and it breaks my heart.