The Defunction

How, and when do friendships extinguish? Defunct and decayed, I look at the remnants of friendships past and wonder how something that was only supposed to be wonderful, could have become something else entirely. How can it be that I never realize what's happening until it has already happened? When the tie is severed and the lines are blocked, that is when I've realized the irreparable damage that has caused the complete desecration of a friend. When the the promise of reprieve in the termination outweighs the benefits of carrying on, then, is it then that a friendship ends? Is it ever really a decision at all? Flames licking the walls, water filling the hull, an ending friendship is a burning house, and a sinking ship all at once. Hopelessness and futility saturate what was once joy-soaked. Frustration binds it all together into a horrible bundle and even then the uncertainty and doubt are overwhelming. Thus is the dilemma in the end: the plaguing wonder.

We met four years ago this fall. I remember distinct details of my first impressions. Each encounter glimmers turned end over end in my memory: a pony tail, a pair of sunglasses glinting in the sun, a halo of hair, a pair of eye glasses peering from around the door, a cowboy hat and two blond braids. I was critical and a tough sell. I was reluctant for reasons that I turn over in my head, all of them tumbling around without resolution. I was resistant to people who only wanted to be my friends. The more I examine the remains, the further the truth slips from me. The memories morph and distorted as they are, they are easy to dismiss. The regrets, not the girls. But I try not to let them allude me. It is at first glance something of a mystery. But then there it is, the pudding: despite my reluctance, and resistance, and what in my memory has become an ornery and ugly demeanor, they resisted and our friendship prevailed.

We were a group of six. If memory serves, the times that weren't tumultuous were brief, and infrequent. Two on one, three on two, two on four, five on one, somebody was always frustrated. It was me a lot. Life in a house crowded with girls never suited me. We were still in discovery, even once we had signed our second lease. It was painful, demoralizing at times, frustrating.

There isn't anything I can say about when Jaymie died. All the details of me in those days are false and trivial. What I did, what I ate, how I slept. And now, with years between now and then, there is still nothing to say about it, what it feels like to lose a friend. I still mistake strangers and hope to find her tucked into some place I've forgotten about, like a piece of sea glass I found at the beach, lost in a pocket for safe keeping.

And now I've lost three. Jaymie departed. A second to decay, another to dysfunction. What do you say to the person to whom you've already said it all? We are different than all other friends, I think. Our pack is an anomaly, an aggrandized group, touched, plagued, tortured by death and immortal because of it. I'm also certain that we are none of these things. In the history of the world, the odds and pure reason tell me that we are just a group of girls, issues just as petty as the next. Yet here we are.

I have the deepest longing for the accompaniment of one of these friends. Any of them, but mostly all of them. I've never said that before because I have never realized I felt it. I've been screening some new friends lately with a meal and a bit of conversation. But that which is lacking is the most integral of details: ease, comfort, history, a common repertoire of references to the past. It's what all the substitutes lack.

In the beginning, we must choose friends for a reason. In our beginning, I believe that my friends chose me for some reason that I don't anticipate ever understanding.