My Best Friend Stopped Speaking To Me One Day Out Of The Blue. It's The Hardest Thing I've Ever Gone Through.
It’s always the stumble over their name that gets to me. A mutual friend at coffee talks about a party, a swim at our friend’s pool, an afternoon of thrifting, and will suddenly remember. I’m not part of that group anymore. We’ll pause for a minute. A little mourning ritual that has become familiar and awkward and awful and sad. And then we’ll just move on. Or they’ll move on together, and we’ll move on together, but the big happy group of us has ended. The text chain that sustained me during the COVID lockdown. The Christmas parties and last-minute night swims at the lake, the deliciously snarky morning coffees, it’s all finished.
And I have never found out why.
The end came slowly but surely, a roll down a hill that starts off gentle but gains horrible momentum beyond control. My silly texts about nothing were met with a thumbs-up, a cyber slap in the face, and my invitations to dinner, to coffee, to try a new eye cream with me met with a formal “Sorry, I have other plans.” Plans that could be canceled when our other mutual friends had dinner, had coffee, and wanted to try out a new eye cream.
I tried to hold on to this hand that was slipping away. I tried so hard that I blush to think of it now. I would still try so hard if I thought it would change anything. I invited my friend for a chat or a walk. I went over every conversation we ever had in my head and tried to think of what I could have done to ruin such a beautiful thing. I reached out with apology after apology for any possible slights. I was told time and again that no, everything was fine. Just a busy time/stressful day/weird moon.
But when we saw each other at friends’ parties, I saw it. A curt “Hi, how are you?” in a room full of people before moving on to someone better. Their back was to me always. Their eyes were a bit dead and blank when they had to talk to me until, eventually, they stopped pretending and didn’t talk to me at all. A room that had once housed our friendship was being boarded up and locked against me. The light had gone out.
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen the light go out for me with other people. I went through my own divorce. I knew a thing or two about that kind of human carnage. My divorce was a wound that did not heal for at least a year. The loss of the life I thought we would have together nearly felled me. I did not sleep for several months, picturing the man I thought I loved living a life without me. My grief was a wave that never seemed to crest until finally, it just did. The wound scabbed over. The grief was so big and so awful but so immediate, a sort of one-time-only kind of pain that followed a timeline. Separation, divorce, loneliness, new life, acceptance. It was not a happy thing, but it was not unclear to me either.
The wound of this friendship will not scab over. It’s been two years, and I still think about it all the time. It is a death by a thousand cuts, made worse because I can’t seem to find the blade that did the cutting. I keep thinking I must have held the blade, and I must have been the one to sever this friendship with my big personality and my big, stupid mouth. I keep worrying that I will end other friendships the same way just by being too much of myself. And I don’t know how to keep that from happening because I don’t know what I did to end this one.
Every time the wound feels like it might heal a little, we are suddenly thrown back together. We live in a small town, so bumping up against each other happens a lot. We ran into each other at the Farmer’s Market recently, a place where we used to eat breakfast sandwiches, drink coffee, and gossip for hours. I was with one of our friends, and the two of them stopped to talk and I just sat feeling embarrassed and confused, my confidence shot. I felt completely unsure of what to do with my arms, my eyes, or my face.
It was the same at the grocery store. Standing in the spice aisle, accidentally locking eyes with this person I loved, yes loved, and seeing their smile immediately shutter at the sight of me. At the sight of me.
Our mutual friends have said they don’t want to get involved. “We love you both,” is the refrain, “we’re staying out of it.” And I understand them, but also I think, “What is the ‘it’ you’re staying out of? Can someone just give me a hint?”
There is no official mourning period for the end of this friendship. In fact, there’s almost no talking about it. Not the end of the thing nor the years of friendship from the before times. There’s no solving the end, and the memories of before make everyone feel weird, sad, and uncomfortable.
This dead friendship is instead a ghost that will never stop haunting me.Jen McGuire is a writer whose personal essays have appeared in Good Housekeeping, O magazine, Parents, Thrillist, and more publications. She has been featured on talk shows like Tamron Hall to discuss her work, and her 2021 memoir Nest sold thousands of copies across the country. Jen lives in a little log cabin in Canada and is a single mom to four adult sons.
Do you have a personal story you’d like to see published on BuzzFeed? Send us a pitch at essay-pitch@buzzfeed.com.
