{"id":510,"date":"2022-11-09T20:38:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/talentedtoad.net\/mintysrecs\/?p=510"},"modified":"2022-11-10T16:05:07","modified_gmt":"2022-11-10T16:05:07","slug":"what-do-you-do-when-the-person-you-thought-would-be-your-best-friend-forever-and-ever-no-longer-feels-the-same-way-on-grieving-the-loss-of-a-long-term-friendship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/talentedtoad.net\/mintysrecs\/?p=510","title":{"rendered":"“What do you do when the person you thought would be your best friend forever and ever no longer feels the same way?”: On grieving the loss of a long-term friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

(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). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody ever warns you about how intense the break-up of a long-term friendship is, how that pain never really goes away \u2013 it just settles and comes back to visit you just as everything else in your life finally starts to feel alright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019d never left home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not going to pretend our falling out isn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019ll never forget those messages or the way my stomach dropped once I realised what had happened was real and not some totally horrid dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019t feel it all the time, it\u2019s 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\u2019t in my contacts anymore and I haven\u2019t even seen her since the night we went to my favourite bar in Manchester and spent \u00a317 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\u2019s a miserable cycle I\u2019m scared I\u2019ll never be able to break free of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s so much I want her to know, I imagine the way she\u2019d laugh whilst I recounted stories of failed Hinge dates over pints or how she\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2019d like to think she\u2019d be proud of me if she knew that I finally got my work published properly too. It\u2019s 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 \u2013 you name it, we\u2019d probably made it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think the love I have for her will ever go away, it\u2019ll just continue changing shape and I\u2019ll push bits of it into the rest of my life and the friendships I have now. It\u2019s there when I answer the phone in the middle of the night to give the worst advice possible because I\u2019ve had two bottles of wine but I know my friend is hurting so I have to be there for him, it\u2019s there when I decide to stay out clubbing into the small hours even though I hate those small sweaty rooms, it\u2019s there when I listen to David Bowie as I paint black lines over my eyelids and it\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(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 \u2013 it just settles and comes back to visit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n"What do you do when the person you thought would be your best friend forever and ever no longer feels the same way?": On grieving the loss of a long-term friendship - MintysRecs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/talentedtoad.net\/mintysrecs\/?p=510\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""What do you do when the person you thought would be your best friend forever and ever no longer feels the same way?": On grieving the loss of a long-term friendship - MintysRecs\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(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). 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