(The title of this piece is a line taken from a letter by Claire Schwartz that was published in the Paris Review’s column: Poetry Rx).
Nobody ever warns you about how intense the break-up of a long-term friendship is, how that pain never really goes away – it just settles and comes back to visit you just as everything else in your life finally starts to feel alright.
I fell out with my best friend of almost fifteen years around this time last year, we had moved to the same university in Manchester and had (by complete coincidence) ended up living in different blocks of the same halls of residence. So much of those first few weeks were spent traipsing between flats, eating huge bowls of pesto pasta and being badly behaved in various clubs, it almost felt like we’d never left home.
I’m not going to pretend our falling out isn’t my fault, I enabled something to happen that never should have and I will spend the rest of my life kicking myself for it (note to self: do not ever give someone the passwords to your phone or social media no matter how much you think you might love them). I spend so much time wondering what life would be like now if I’d realised how wrong it was that my partner (at the time) was so jealous of the friendship I had with this person that she asked me to cut them off and when I refused to do it, she took matters into her own hands and did it herself from my social media. I’ll never forget those messages or the way my stomach dropped once I realised what had happened was real and not some totally horrid dream.
I’ve talked before about how the grief I feel is comparable to that feeling when you go swimming in the sea and the current is so strong that the gross, salty water starts to fill your mouth and lungs until it burns your insides and you spend what feels like forever struggling to get your breath back so many times before. I don’t feel it all the time, it’s at its worst when something happens to me and I reach for my phone to tell her about it (because she was always the first to know everything) and then I remember her number isn’t in my contacts anymore and I haven’t even seen her since the night we went to my favourite bar in Manchester and spent £17 on two double gin and lemonades because neither of us could stomach tonic. It makes my stomach lurch and suddenly, everything comes flooding back and I will spend the next few days almost entirely consumed by guilt. It’s a miserable cycle I’m scared I’ll never be able to break free of.
There’s so much I want her to know, I imagine the way she’d laugh whilst I recounted stories of failed Hinge dates over pints or how she’d squirm in horror once she learnt about the time I almost died in Newcastle. I want to tell her that I am so much happier now than I was in the last 12 months of our friendship, how I don’t let people walk all over me anymore and I finally learnt what it means to be happy without relying on other people all the time. I’d like to think she’d be proud of me if she knew that I finally got my work published properly too. It’s quite funny really because her mum sometimes comments on things I write when I share them on Facebook and it always makes me think about when we were kids talking about what our lives would be like as adults, conjuring up all these huge dreams in which the other always featured somewhere: huge houses in faraway places, stupidly unrealistic jobs – you name it, we’d probably made it up.
I don’t think the love I have for her will ever go away, it’ll just continue changing shape and I’ll push bits of it into the rest of my life and the friendships I have now. It’s there when I answer the phone in the middle of the night to give the worst advice possible because I’ve had two bottles of wine but I know my friend is hurting so I have to be there for him, it’s there when I decide to stay out clubbing into the small hours even though I hate those small sweaty rooms, it’s there when I listen to David Bowie as I paint black lines over my eyelids and it’s there swelling in my chest when I wake up next to the same boy in my bed every week because I know all she wanted was for me to be happy and I am (finally).