Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Going... Going... Gone
Last night I deleted someone from my life. It wasn't that hard. Press a button on a cell phone, and you can electronically erase someone from its memory. Same thing with an email address. Too bad it can't work that way with my head. It's true that friends come and go in a person's life, but when you've been friends with someone for years, you kind of expect the relationship to always be there. And when it just disappears without explanation, that hurts. There's an entire section in bookstores dedicated to helping people get through the pain of breaking up with a boyfriend or coping with divorce, but try to find a book that gets you through the loss of a friend. Sorry, but you're basically on your own for that. It wasn't easy, deleting this person. In fact, I put it off for a long time because I wanted to believe that our friendship was still there, but what I was clinging to was the memory of a once-strong friendship that had faded over the years. The truth is, people change. They grow apart. And keeping a cell phone number can't always disguise the fact that the friend you want to hang on to has slowly become a stranger.
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Hear, hear! Entire sections in bookstores devoted to helping you with the loss of a spouse or relative, but none devoted to helping you with the loss of a friend - and it's the worst, hardest loss of all, for the simple reason that the person in question ISN'T GONE. They still LOOK the same, they still SOUND the same, they still mostly ACT the same. But some little betrayal - something so small you couldn't even describe it to an interested third party - some little twist of difference has choked off whatever unpredictable combination of factors led to a 'spark' between you.
Much as it pains me to say so, Cicero was right: old friends are the single greatest joy in this life, and the single rarest.
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