No Proofreads. No Edits.

At the end of 2023 it hit me that my oldest friend of 30 years was not my friend anymore. This isn’t one of those things where the season ends and you’re stuck holding the silver medal wondering what could have been. This is a somewhere between a slow death and two to the head. It’s one of those things where this friendship got killed by one party while the other, me, still thought we were myspace top 8 for God-knows-how-long after it was dead. I guess I should be embarrassed? I am not.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about the death of this friendship. I have talked openly about it with The Gaffer and wrestle with scenarios in my head. As you may be able to tell, I am not the most filitered person in the room so thoughts of me offending someone, not realizing I need to apologize, or just being plain annoying have all had their turns at the buffet of “what if’s.” The rational brain in me knows that cannot be true. You cannot know someone for thirty years, go through puberty, watch each other get married, attend parent’s funerals, compare parenthood notes and end a friendship just because someone misspoke. Plus, we were the type of friends who would call each other out on that shit.

There is a huge contingency, and they may be right, that believes you shouldn’t make close friendships with the opposite sex once you’re married. I won’t discuss the spectrum of Mike Pence to Hugh Hefner as it relates to female friends in marriage, but I will say that there has to be a grandfather clause on some of this. Not everyone wants to bang- unless it’s Mike Pence (10/10). Even so, the frienship had already been stripped down to the minmum (which was great for everyone). I would call once every 3-6 months when sitting in traffic and we’d catch up on kids, school, life. We’d hang up. I would then move on to the next old friend as I watched the city smog set over midtown in bumper to bumper. We had the occasional text of, “How is your brother?” or “I ran into ______, today. They got fat.” It didn’t feel like a brother-sister as it wasn’t that close, but it absolutely felt like your favorite cousin.

If I am being honest, I don’t care about the friendship as much as I do about the closure. You don’t want to be freinds with me anymore? Fine, I’ll live. I’m busy, I treated this friendship well, I can move on and probably make myself the hero of this story with enough weed and imagination. I think it’s the Irish goodbye in late 2023 that leaves me unsatsified. It is not my day-to-day that makes me think about this loss however; it’s the future. What do I do when her mom passes away? The same mom who took me in almost every day and invited me on family vacations. What do I do when my parents die? The same parents who coached her in soccer and attended her wedding. If I hear through the grapevine that she is sick, do I call? She has no idea I have four kids now. Shits weird.

In sum, I guess it’s over and no one has a right to a termination letter, there is no severence, your ID card just doesn’t work anymore and you’re locked out of the facility. Don’t be a pussy; get over it.

***

I wonder about their mom. These little souls got Irish goodbyed by their own mother. Maybe she made an attempt to explain as opposed to a cold exit, but they are too young to understand anyway. Also, this isn’t some friend who lives a parallel life, this is the person who brought them into this world. No explanation, no texts, no letters, no phone calls.

What do we do as parents if tragedy strikes in their biological mother’s life? Do we shield these fragile children or do we just show up unannounced trying to explain what we have not mentioned for months (or years). When someone turns the water off on a relationship, cold turkey, only one party knows why and the internal scavenger hunt for answers can be really fucking annoying.

It’s coming. At some point she is going to want to know why mama left her. Why mama let her go. How the fuck she got here. If she is patient, she may see the love in her mother’s release, but I think that will come later. I think she has to go through stages and the first 11 are going to really suck.

He doesn’t know yet. His brain doesn’t know yet. There will one day be a realization that when he looks in the mirror or at a photograph that he is different. He will put two and two together that his difference and this mythological birth figure we have told him about are a major part of his story. What will he do? Will he keep the water off or will he dig and dig until the answers drown him?

I don’t know. The world is cruel. Rejection comes in many forms. Do whatever you can to end things with a valediction; not for you, for the other person.