As I write this it has been 121 days, 15 hours, 17 minutes and 42 seconds since I last spoke to my - at the time - Great Best Friend. I thought about him before I wrote this. I thought about him while I watched 3 episodes of Twin Peaks tonight - we, mistakenly, I found out, watched episode 2 first, instead of 1, together a few months back. I thought about him when I opened Twitter my 11th time today. I thought about him when my first daily binge eating urge came. I thought about him when I thought about my favorite videogame: Flower, Sun and Rain. I thought about him when I thought about my second favorite videogame of 2021: The Silver Case. I thought about him when I felt a second binge-eating urge approach. I thought about him when I felt lonely today. I thought about him when I thought about how I don't talk to anyone besides 3 Great Best Friends these days. I thought about Him when I remembered I hadn't spoken to any of Them today. I thought about him when I remembered I couldn't speak to them, much as I wanted to.
I think about Flower, Sun and Rain every day. I think about The Silver Case most days. I open Twitter multiple times a day (I'm addicted).
I think about my Great Best Friend every day. I - still - think about my Great Best Friend multiple times a day.
Yet it took me this long, today, just before the second achingly long compulsion to eat, to realize that he would likely never speak to me again.
This isn't me feeling bad for myself, far from it. This is my ever-growing awareness of the fact that I Fucked Things Up This Year. It's a small - yet important - part of my lifelong continuing conscientization that I have, in many ways, been A Bad Person.
I have by now finished season 1 of Twin Peaks. It owned. I get the hype. I watched half of episode 1 of season 2 right after and it ruled but it was also feature length. I had to pause and have since not gone back. It has now been over a year since my friend told me he'd tell me when he was ready to talk to me again. I don't think it's ever happening. I'm fine with that now. He's since blocked me on twitter. Our common friends, for some reason, pretend they never talk to him, and that he never existed. When a topic that warranted his existence came up one of them made sure to preamble with an "I guess it's fine to tell you this". It's, quite frankly, disturbing and I'll bring it up one day when I get the chance and the mood's right.
Regardless, the truth is, while the wound of losing someone you considered nearest to you cuts deep and undoubtedly affects me in small ways in my day to day, I have essentially moved on from it. What I mean by this is while the abscence of his presence *is* certainly felt, there isn't much pain there anymore. I don't think /about/ him multiple times a day anymore, it's my good memories of our friendship that prop up from time to time now. We'll never speak to each other again and that's fine now. We'll never talk about personal histories, music we're listening to, things we've seen, shows we're watching, texts we're reading, compare and contrast his countrys virulent anticommunism with my countrys fraught and lost socialist ambitions in the 20th century, meander meaninglessly about topics we know little about but find stimulating nonetheless. All of that is fine. It's helped me learn that the people you meet become embbeded in you forever, even if they leave. And that how you deal with that depends on how much you're willing to learn from to become better. Hardly a unique, exciting, revolutionary perspective on the matter, yea, but one I think everyone takes from at some point in their lives, no? It just took me 23 years, is all.
This chapter (pardon the cliche) is one I've been slowly closing for this past year, and have, in fact, yet to finish, probably. The only closure I need is personal: Slowly coming to the realization that I wasn't That bad, that it was mutual, and an amazing friendship that ever-so-slowly crept into extreme codependency. That it didn't end up worse sooner is probably a testament to our character and bond.
I am now okay with friendships and relationships not lasting forever. And the thought and lesson of that being so freeing, is all the better.
If you somehow read this: I hope you're okay.