I’m lying.
I’m not busy this weekend; I’m not ready to see you and pretend everything’s fine.
I want to forgive you. I do — for you and me. But it’s probably not going to happen this weekend.
So far, the scariest part of letting you go is that it feels better than holding on.
I was confident we’d be sitting at Central Perk sipping cappuccinos and laughing about life until our sides ached by now. Spoiler: I’m tired of pretending that telling the truth doesn’t feel so right. I’m tired of investing so much into our friendship and getting blamed for everything that goes wrong in it.
I have not been a perfect friend. But I’ve been a good one.
My words reflected my true character and good intentions. I am giving myself the freedom to let it all out, and still, I approach our troubled friendship with love and empathy the way I always have.
It’s my strength and weakness.
I wish you would take responsibility for how you’ve treated me over the years. I want to forgive, forget, and move on either way. I might as well get a few more things off my chest since I’m here:
I think your husband is a jerk. You said those awful things to me to cover for him. I saw his true colors a long time ago; they’re ugly. It scares me that I’m right, and he is every terrible thing I think he is; I’m scared that he will hurt you if he hasn’t already.
I can’t do a damn thing but write about it.
We’ve been friends for almost thirty years, and you’ve pushed me away for at least half of them; it was your defense mechanism when things got shitty. I showed up anyway — no questions asked; it’s kind of my thing. It’s what you love most about me and what you’ve taken for granted all these years.
I don’t know where to begin a healthy relationship with you. My boundaries are exploited repeatedly, and I don’t know who I am more upset with: your husband for being the slithering scumbag he is or you for allowing him to poison our friendship.
If I’m honest, I’m mad at myself right now for being so vulnerable in this letter.
Your husband has driven a vast wedge between us, and I don’t know if I can get to the other side. He controls everything, and I’m fighting a losing battle. For example, the day your son was born, he didn’t have the decency to tell me you were going into emergency surgery. My gut tells me he did it intentionally and didn’t want me there. His eyes turned green with jealously whenever we hung out; it was so strange how something always came up, and he had to call you multiple times and interrupt our time together.
I want you to know a few more things: Your son has a massive chunk of my heart. I hope he hangs onto it and always feels how much I love him no matter what happens.
I’m scared that things have become too complicated, and I can’t navigate our friendship on my own anymore.
I’m scared that I will never meet your daughter, and they will never know how great of friends we used to be. I guess these are the reasons why I’ve been avoiding you in the first place. It’s much easier to cut you off than to have this real-life conversation.
The scariest thing is not being there when you need me the most and not knowing if I can be the friend I used to be anymore.
Love Always,
Your Childhood BFF
P.s. — We aren’t kids anymore.
Addendum: I wrote this letter around the same time I wrote this one. Re-reading it four years later was a slap in the face. It made me realize four things: How much energy I focused on other people, how unhealthy and unsafe my relationships have been, the role I played in those toxic connections, and that my codependency grooves run deep. I’m also embarrassed for using more “you” than “I” statements when I wrote them in the heat of the moment. Of course, a lot has happened since this letter — but that’s a story for another day.
Thank you for reading. ❤ I love you all.
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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.
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