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Writing To A Ghost
When best friends morph into strangers
Carrie Bradshaw asked, “If you love someone and you break up, where does the love go?”
And it’s a good question, applying to more than just romantic relationships. Friend breakups, for example: where does the love go?
When you spend fifteen-plus years thethered — soul to soul — with someone. When you call yourselves best friends and promise to always stand by each others’ sides, through growing up and changing and creating lives as individuals. When you’ve already tackled a million obstacles with each other. When you know each other better than anyone else including, sometimes, yourselves, and it all goes sideways…where does the love go?
In my case, it goes down on paper. Or rather, in our age of digital everything, typed onto a screen. Sometimes it even gets posted to my Instagram stories, with the knowledge that they will likely look at it and be the only other person who laughs the way I did. The only other person who gets it. Sometimes the love crumbles into splinters that get doled out from a distance when I’m at my weakest, when there is nothing to do but acknowledge the very specifically shaped hole in my life.
It’s been over a year since my ex-best friend and I have spoken in any real sense. We have both attended events of mutual friends…
