I was caught so unexpected and so much at a loss. I can’t shake the sadness as easily as I should be able to. Which is trite as it is your sadness, your loss, and your pain. I wonder what my motivator is? How many times is our understanding of grief framed by our own situations? Maybe you can never truly grieve for others without it doubling up to say something about you? Maybe that is the weakness of mankind?
You were my best friend but it has been almost two years since I spoke to you. During this, the times you have crossed my mind have been fleeting. They have also been triggering and I have compartmentalized them for my own piece of mind.
We blended so seamlessly together that I was dumbfounded that we could ever be brought down. In that heady first year of our friendship, I thought you were my soulmate. Not romantically, but in the sense there was a girl that I could see my life unfolding with, that type of female friendship that is like a second skin.
And therein lies the problem, you can only climb so high before they will claw at you and try to drag you back down. It was discrepancies with our other friendships, boys who were so far from men, lives longed for and experiences that were too trying.
I remember so strongly crying next to my mum asking her whether these girls (you included) had ruined me. Sharing some but not everything that had contributed to our demise. In my mind, female friendship is as powerful as love, and in that way it can destroy you as fully.
But that was then and this is now. And the wrongs and the rights seems to diminish and leave a space where I cannot help but speak up. During this time when your heart is aching, and you will be experiencing a sadness that I am yet to know, my mind cannot turn away.
I do not know the person you have become, how losing her slowly over these years has changed you. But I have to tell you that though time has changed us (for better and no doubt for worse), I am thinking of you and sending all of my love (no matter how empty that often sounds).
Maybe this is for my peace of mind, maybe it is for yours. All I can do is what I know to be right in my heart. Maybe I can find a space in your life, or you one in mine? Though I know even as I write this, it is futile. I cry for your loss, at times as if it is my own. I have been made selfish by it.
But I love you Jitch, I always did and I always will.
