By Request

The Wrong Kind of Closure *

I remember the day I wrote that card, it seemed almost trivial. I was sending a card to my best friend to say goodbye. We’d grown apart in the last months for a reason that I will never be able to figure out. It wasn’t my choice, but I was dealing with losing him. He was having surgery, though I wasn’t ever told the details of it. I thought it was a good time to send him my best wishes, we’d been through so much and I thought I knew what he needed to hear. It seemed like the right thing to do, I wanted closure. I wanted to be able to say it was done, ended on a decent note with a kind goodbye.

We’d been through a lot together, and even though we weren’t always close for those two years, he was always someone very important in my life. This card was meant to give me peace of mind, so I could think of him in a good light even though I was so hurt from our ended friendship. I was so close to not sending the card. I forced myself to walk down the stairs, open the door, and place it in the mail box. I even stood there and questioned if I should put the flag up. But I did, I put it up and walked away, and my card was carried away that day. It honestly slipped my mind for about a week.

Then it happened. Wandering on Facebook, bored, I stumbled onto a post on his wall. I read it innocently enough, not realizing what was in store. I remember reading it, almost a year later, so vividly. My stomach dropped and my heart almost stopped. I couldn’t focus, and I couldn’t understand what I was reading. There they were. My words were telling him that I would always care. They were telling him that I would always love him as my best friend. That he meant so much to me, even if he had always believed that he meant so little to the world. That I believed in him. Those were my words, but they were said to him mockingly, by someone who wasn’t me.

I was changed after that day. It broke my heart knowing that my best friend, who I’d turned to for everything the past two years, would throw it away for no reason – and then laugh at me for it. He showed other people one of the most personal things I’d ever written on paper, and openly ridiculed me for it. It tore me apart like I was that paper, found to be as worthless as he had considered our friendship.

It wasn’t the first time he’d thrown me out like that, but I made sure it would be the last. Learning you’re better off from a long friendship is hard, and you can’t ever really recover. I don’t think I want to fully recover, because I want to remember. I want to remember that I’m better for moving on, and I want to remember to never treat the people I’ve cared about that way. I lost more then just a friend that day. I lost trust that, since that day, I haven’t been able to give. It’s more painful then just growing apart from your best friend. I wanted closure, I wanted peace of mind. I did get closure, but not the kind I wanted.

You want to leave old friends on good terms, so happy memories don’t make you cry, so if you see them somewhere you aren’t afraid to say hello, so you don’t cringe every time someone mentions their name, so you don’t sit across from them in a classroom and wonder how their life is without you. I didn’t get the closure that I wanted. Eventually, with time, I’ve gained peace of mind. We both ended up okay, I’m happy and I’ve gained new friendships, I’ve learned, I’ve moved on. I know I’m a better person, I learned a valuable lesson, but that moment in time when I felt so humiliated will always be there.

* Posted with permission of the author, Precious Youngest