The End of a Friendship

I, like many others I suspect, first found The Way of a Pilgrim through J.D. Salinger’s stories in Franny and Zooey. A few years ago, when things in my life didn’t look too good, this book meant a lot to me. It still does. It recounts a pilgrim’s journey across Russia and his wish to understand what it means to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5-17). Combined with this orange and banana smoothie it's a good way to start the Easter week.

I lost a friend last week. I watched it happen, too. I was “unfriended”, which I guess is, in social media, the same as being given the pink slip. It took me a bit by surprise, because it seemed such a teenagey thing to do: To “unfriend” someone. I didn’t think grown people did that. But it hurt. Of course it did. Although in reality it wasn’t all that unexpected.

“It doesn’t matter if it was a relationship or a friendship. When it ends your heart breaks,” someone wrote once. I think that’s true. Another friend told me: “But if a person does that to you, was she ever a true friend then?” I don’t know.

Cultural differences played a big part in this particular friendship. And though cultural differences can be so exciting and are – in the end – what I’m drawn to, they can make all partnerships difficult to navigate. It would have been so much easier with a friend from home, where people are allowed to argue and talk (even women) and where a person is allowed to have views and can speak up. But that’s Sweden and it is not OK to do so in all cultures or with all people. Some people shut you off if you say or do something they dislike. They exclude you. All of a sudden you walk down the street and they don’t say hello anymore, or they say hello in that silly, fake way. Which in turn, brings back memories from school, where groups of children – girls especially – would freeze someone out, ostracizing her, giving her the cold-shoulder. A vicious thing to do.

Here’s what I liked about my friend: We were both immigrants. We both felt, I guess, like Alice in Wonderland. It was easy to be with her. We both liked to walk. We discussed the eternal “Do you think you’ll always stay here, or do you think one day you’ll move back to your country?” We agreed on so many things (and disagreed on so many things too). She had style, I liked that. She had an eye for things. She was smart. 

I know what’s bound to happen now: Like a lawyer, I’m going to start building my case against her. I know she will also do that, if she hasn’t already begun. The case of why I am such a despicable person. Because I’m Swedish and speak out (when I should remain quiet and feminine), because injustices hurt me, because I’m cruel for questioning things that I feel are wrong. Because I’d rather discuss something – really discuss it – than be forced to enter this silent hell. The best way was to get rid of me. Simple and efficient.

Meanwhile, I would have liked it if she’d said:
“You hurt me with your outspokenness! I can’t stand how your tongue has to lash out at everything you feel is unfair. Why do you always behave like that?”
Then I could’ve explained myself.

But maybe friendships actually aren’t meant to last forever. Maybe they come with an invisible expiration date. The friends I’ve lost along the way, I’ve lost because I moved, we always moved around a lot, and distance and time slacken the tightest bonds, I swear. You move on, you meet new people, and you change. That’s life and I think that if friendships have to end, this is how they should go down. Easy as a sun about to set. No hard feelings. Those friendships are like the Victorian scraps I collected as a child, beautiful and sentimental and put to rest at their very finest hour.

I disagree with all those hip notions of getting rid of “toxic friendships”. It's supposed to be so Zen and so Buddha. I would love to see a Zen monk stop talking (if indeed they talk) to another Zen monk because he deems him "toxic".  It’s as if we’ve become so lazy that we don’t want to wrestle a bit to make things work. Compromise. Work around things. Accept each other as we are. It’s easy to walk away. It’s hard to stay. I view that in the same light as I view romantic relationships, which we tend to abandon at the first whiff of sourness.

“Get rid of him!”
“There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”
That sort of thing.

I was a bit shocked to see how many quotes there are out there about the end of friendships. Shocked perhaps because it’s never really happened to me before like this. Anyway, here are a few of them:

“Some people are going to leave, but that’s not the end of your story. That’s the end of their part in your story.”

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“There will always be a ‘lie’ in believe, an ‘over’ in lover, an ‘end’ in friends, an ‘us’ in trust and an ‘if’ in life.”