When My Friend Dumped Me

Ooooh … friendship loss.

I could tell you about my friend from college, who got all the boys I liked, binge-ate along with me (except that she threw it up and was skinny), and who “broke up with me” by saying she couldn’t be the kind of friend I needed. This was after she commiserated with me about my brother’s suicide, saying that she knew exactly how I felt.

Because her cat had just died.

I wrote her a scathing letter in reply, which prompted her breakup. And I did try after that, later regretting my hasty words. But in the end, she was right – she couldn’t be the kind of friend I needed.

I could tell you about my friend from church, who convinced me that I had promised to give her both my wedding shawl and my favourite navy blue trench coat, when I was pretty sure I had just loaned both of those things while my husband and I did a year’s sabbatical in Africa – you know, a place where shawls and coats wouldn’t be needed. We gave her Power of Attorney while we were gone, but that didn’t do much good when she didn’t open all the mail, and we incurred a year’s worth of late fees and low credit scores because of a small credit card statement that was never paid.

Anyway, when the church fell apart a few months after our return, so did our friendship. I would have wanted to remain close and work through it, but I don’t think she really knew who I was. And it turns out I didn’t really know her either.

So I could tell you about those breakups. But instead, I’ll tell you about the first time my heart was broken. And this dubious honour was not given by my first boyfriend Mike, who lived a few towns over, wore his hair cut in a straight line across his forehead, and wore football jerseys with bare skin underneath.

No. My first heartbreak came from Joanne. We were eleven, and I had never known that such a sharp pain and such a dull void could actually be tangled up in one sensation.

“You have too much imagination,” she said on the phone when I asked her why she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Years later, I would understand this to mean:

You are too co-dependent and I need room to breathe.

You are too insecure.

You are too sensitive and emotional.

But in that moment, I didn’t understand anything at all. Ever since we had moved to this part of town in the third grade, she was my friend. And we sang the Titanic song on the swings (uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants, it was sad when that great ship went down to the bottom of the seeeeea).

And I stood there stupidly when she fell head-first off the wooden slide, where – instead of breaking her neck, she threw open her mouth in a loud wail that was bright orange with chewed carrots.

And I spent sleepovers at her house where I discovered the heavenly elixir of peanut butter and Fluff, and where all of us (she had many siblings, and her sleepovers were epic) poured over her brother’s Hustler magazine that she had secreted out of his room – an event that made me feel so empty I decided it was time to curl up in my sleeping bag and go to sleep. Sleepovers where we snuck out of the house at 4:00AM and ran to a nearby wooded hill, climbed to the top of it – breathless and cold – and  huddled, daring ourselves to stay.

(And yes, if you must know, I keep my own children under lock and key).

As sixth grade drew to a close, I knew things were shifting with us, but I didn’t understand it. When she won a competition (Science? Math? Spelling? I don’t know. She was brilliant) and I echoed the grownup phrase I thought I was supposed to say, “Joanne, I’m so proud of you,” she got up and said, “It’s not a matter of which to be proud.” And she swept away in a dignified storm on white roller-skates. That was the beginning of the end. That was a couple of days before the call.

You have too much imagination.

I was terrified to enter junior high without my best friend at my side. I never thought to make another friend, so I had no reserves. Why? I already had one! And – if truth be told – I hoped she would change her mind and take me back.

But nope. She and Laney started a “Hate Jennie” club, which thankfully never attracted more than its two founding members. And I spent many lunches, filled with anxiety about where I would sit and who would eat with me. Sometimes a person would take pity on me and try to integrate me into their group. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I ate at a large round table – red-faced and alone.

She never once talked to me. I tried a couple of times when I had made a few other friends, and the hurt had mostly died down – to be … friendly, at least. But she looked right past me and remained silent. She didn’t respond to my tentative offerings of civility.

In my senior year, I switched high schools. It was for the drama department (ostensibly), but it was also for a new beginning. College couldn’t come fast enough for me and I jumped for change a year early. After a very rocky beginning in my new school, I was adopted into the hippest (hippiest), coolest, most laid-back crowd, and I learned to be easier in my own skin. College was a piece of cake for me after that.

In the four summers between college, I lifeguarded for the city’s Parks and Recreation. Joanne was also lifeguarding for the city, but my path never crossed with hers. Until … one summer when I was lifeguarding at my favorite Olympic pool with the water-slide and destiny caught us in the crosshairs. We were short on guards, and we needed to call in subs from some of the other city pools.

One of the subs was Joanne.

It wasn’t just that we were in the guard room together, I was also following her in rotation. It was a hot summer day, which meant that we were up for an hour and 45 minutes, and down on break for 15 minutes. She would go to the first chair, and then 15 minutes later, I would go and relieve her so she could move on to the next station and relieve that guard. And on and on it would go – seven times. The process of relieving a guard took time. It entailed me standing by the lifeguard chair and scanning the water while she got down, and then her staying by the chair and scanning the water while I climbed up. And we had to repeat the procedure each time.

Oh great, I thought to myself. Won’t this be fun? I think I was also feeling some residual nervousness – the kind you can only feel when you meet up again with the person from whom your entire being has been summarily dismissed.

But much to my amazement, as she was climbing down from the chair, she spoke the first words that she had addressed to me in ten years. It was something innocuous. Some ordinary, chit-chat type of utterance that would suit the occasion of having to make small talk every fifteen minutes or so. I don’t remember what she said, or what I said in return – or if I was even able to say anything at all. I just know that inside my feelings were in turmoil. And my brain was a complete void.

Here, this person is talking to me for the first time in ten years, and I can think of absolutely nothing to say back.

Huh. I guess I just lacked the imagination.

This book – My Other Ex – is filled with stories of friendship breakups just like this one – stories of loss and separation of the most heartbreaking kind that can only happen between bosom friends. And let me tell you, the stories in here are exquisitely written.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think all that much about the friends I’ve lost. I tend to compartmentalise the pain and/or the embarrassment and move on. Perhaps when I was younger, I surrendered to the loss a bit less easily and tried to re-establish contact. But now I know myself a little better. And I understand the friends a bit better. It is never one-sided. Even in the case of Joanne, the blame did not fall entirely on her.

I think that’s what’s good about reading stories like this. You feel less alone, less … stupid, I guess, for having missed the signs that things were not going well. You didn’t protect your heart, or you were not careful with hers. But it’s not a bad idea to take the sometimes-catastrophic ending to a once-dear friendship out of that tiny compartment in your heart, and re-examine it to see if

you have learned something

and if you are still better off apart than you once were together

and – in the case of a few people in the book – to try again, though decades of water may have gone under the bridge.

The stories make you question things, and feel things, and examine things. And that, in essence, is precisely what a good book should do.

You can buy My Other Ex on Amazon by clicking here. 🙂

(I forgot to add that I received this book free, but gave the review voluntarily).

Droit d’auteur: elenathewise / 123RF Banque d’images

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