Mauve Momma #13

I have lived in fear for this moment: the prompt I had no good answer for. Not only that, but Marie had to taunt me with my strangeness: "We've all done it." (Which begs the question, who's all done it? Girls? I can't see many guys saying "We can't be friends anymore.") At any rate, I haven't done it.
 
There are places I’ll remember
All my life...though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
 
It happened to me, twice; in eighth grade my best friend of a year abruptly stopped speaking to me and refused to tell me why, finally informing me I "was mean." I had been getting rides from her mother to the bus stop every morning and the Montero became utterly silent and awkward. That stung a lot. It didn't happen again until college, where my debate partner and good friend suddenly quit the activity a few weeks before we were scheduled to go to camp together. She sent a long, rambling email to the coach and myself, outlining her internal dilemmas, and promising to call me immediately. She didn't. She didn't pick up her phone for me or return my calls or emails. All year. Not only had I lost my co-captain and sleepover buddy in an email breakup, there was no varsity debater I could pair up with for my senior year. I cried. That experience hurt more than any romantic problem I had had to that point.
 
Some have gone and some remain
 
But I have never given notice and quit like that; nor have I initiated a dramatic confrontation that ended a friendship. Not my style. It is much more like me to let things wither away, left unfinished, the way I slipped out of high school after three years, losing contact with half my original class in the process; the way I finished college a mere one quarter early, just enough to disappear from my rooms without telling everyone and be on a plane to Houston before graduation ceremonies started; the way I maniacally pound away at various manifestos, only to leave them half-written and ignored. Finishing what I start isn't my strong point.
 
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
 
And because of that, there are very few people from high school and even less from college that I still consider friends. (With two exceptions, all my "college friends" went to other colleges. Oh, debate.) I'm a fair to middling correspondent. I lose phone numbers all the time. I remind myself to write back to your "how are ya" email before you fall off the first page of my inbox, and then I forget to remind myself.
 
But I'm honest enough to admit that even these actions are voluntary. When you're halfway across town with your buddies and three-quarters of the way through the pitcher, and you remember you promised to water your neighbors' plants, you know you're lying when you later say you forgot. And when you let it go for one day, and then one day more, you can't cry ignorance as to the results. You can't pretend the plants dried and yellowed by themselves, in a no-fault plant suicide. And as go the potted azaleas, so go the friendships. There's Ann, and Liz, and Natalie, and Jason, and Floria. At some point, one of us pulled the life support plug, and the other just went to the cafeteria for coffee and a day-old donut.
 
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I’ve loved them all
 
And it's just as well. Sometimes you don't have anything more to say to each other, once you reach different vantage points in life. My stories would make them yawn, or disapprove. (The Christian fellowship friends wouldn't know what to say about me moving in with a quasi-Jew.) It doesn't bother me that there won't be twenty childhood friends at my wedding. They have left behind the requisite yearbook signatures and bunny ears in my school pictures...stories about that one time at the track meet and that other on the choir bus. A stilted email does no honor to those memories. And so we let it die with dignity. And we love who we have around us now, completely and without thought of how long they'll stay.
 
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life-
I love you more.