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It might go without saying, but I have never been good at starting a conversation. Consequently, as the days ticked on and despite the stress and pain that came from the silence between Ellie and me, said silence remained unbroken. I couldn’t even bring myself to try and strike its surface with the quickest message or word. I didn’t know what that word would be, even when it felt obvious. I knew she’d want to hear about Chris, as an example. It was the sort of good news that most people share with a friend. She’d be happy I found love with someone who would not, under any circumstances, sleep with one of my sisters. And if I asked her to be a bridesmaid when/if I married Chris, she wouldn’t offer to be the getaway driver instead.
Or she would have had I not been ghosting her for so many weeks. I didn’t know where we stood anymore or if the periods of silence between us had eaten away the entirety of our friendship. The implications were hard for me to stomach, but with September marching on, there was almost something inescapable about them. There was some impending reckoning that I was doing my best to avoid.
Then again, she was also staying silent. She could have reached out to me at any time, like she had been before, but that had stopped. There was no recent message from her. There were no updates or news or anything of the sort. So it felt like she had forgotten I existed. And that was the lesser of all possible evils. Because what if she did remember me but with anger and frustration not fondness? I’d rather have nothingness than her anger, but the nothingness still hurt. And much like the changing of the calendar, it also insisted that I think about the implications of this silence. I didn’t want to, but there was a chance I would have to.
Because at what point do you accept that a friendship has died? This wasn’t even about the silence anymore, about the days or weeks of unanswered messages or unsaid thoughts. There were a couple years of me wearing on Ellie’s nerves to consider. All the stupid things I had ever said to her and every social stumble on my part lingered in the front of my mind. I was always thinking about how much of a problem I posed. And in that silence, Ellie was spared from my chaos and mistakes. And that had to be invigorating.
It was news to her, however. She didn’t seem to notice the dead weight I brought into her life while we still worked together. Maybe she didn’t immediately realize it because I was useful. I was happy to help her with her job when she needed it. If she was under any sort of crunch, I would take some tasks off of her desk. And if she was stressed, I would try to comfort her, though I often failed at it.
But someone else could do all of that in my absence. I might have coveted the role, but I never had a real claim on it.
It was something I should have made peace with, but I didn’t want to. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be my choice. Time would take over, really. A mysterious ‘they’ regularly says that time heals all wounds, but I had noticed that said ‘they’ make no follow up statement on the quality of that healing. Consequently, it was possible that my wounds would forever be raw but not bleeding.
And I wouldn’t call that healing, but my opinion on the matter wasn’t considered.
But then Ellie texted me the words, I have big news!!!
The message came to me on one of the few nights Chris didn’t come over. He was at Happy Flour working on a new pizza, a pursuit that seemed both overly simple and overly complicated simultaneously. He tried to explain it, and I told him I understood he needed to be doing that, which was true. But I didn’t tell him that it was getting harder to be alone despite all the years I had lived alone. Something in me had changed, turning my discomfort with silence into a need for company. But I didn’t know how to bring that up. It didn’t seem right to bring that up, especially when I didn’t know how to explain it. And as a grown woman who had spent nights alone in that home before we got serious, I didn’t really have a right to that discomfort. There were no crimes in that neighborhood to shake up my perception of safety. The cottage was in good working order. But now that I had the option of company, I lamented the old status quo.
Consequently, I should have been happy to hear from Ellie. She could have been the companion that chased the creeping isolation and despair away. It was a role she had assumed before. She had often been the pressure valve for my dysfunction and the ghost lamp that lit up the darkened theater stage of my life. But she was also the ghost that haunted said darkened stage, which created complications.
I have news! Call me, she typed. Like the second you can.
So I did despite the storm of doubt burning within me.
“Mia!” she cheered excitedly right when she answered.
I could hear that she was smiling from ear to ear. But no matter how her voice sounded or what her expression might have been, my name in her voice didn’t bother me like one might have expected. As much as I didn’t like my name and as much baggage as it carried, it had an unmistakable sweetness when she said it. It was like a classical flute solo, the soft chirping that soared through the air cleared by the heavy rumble of the larger orchestra.
But even with that small bit of comfort, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to break my silent streak despite how badly I wanted to. It didn’t help that I had nothing to go off of. Ellie said nothing but was giggling. But despite that clear sign that she was happy in that conversation with me, I still felt like I was an imposition. Even asking about her news felt like an unfair demand. She had to break said news when it suited her, not when I demanded it. And yet, the temptation remained. I wanted to know what could make her so happy. I loved her happiness, and I was eager to know what had brought this precious good into the world.
But as it stood, I did not need to wait long. Just as I was gathering my footing, Ellie got straight to the point.
“I met someone,” she blurted out. “And I think I have a new boyfriend.”
My heart fell. I didn’t know why. I hadn’t expected that news or my reaction to said news. And frankly, I had no right or reason to feel the way I did. Because I didn’t love Ellie. I loved her, but I didn’t love her like that. I didn’t want to possess her, but I wanted time with her. Or I had wanted that time only to forsake it through a series of choices that weren’t fully thought out. So I must not have wanted it that badly, right? I must not have cared about Ellie that much to let our relationship fall away like I did.
“Yeah,” I stammered, trying to choke down my flurry of emotions so that I could put on a mask of supportive joy, but the fit was bad no matter how I tried to angle it. “Where’d you meet him?”
Her answer brushed against my ear just before it fell flat to the ground. As rude as it was, I wasn’t really listening to her. Rather, I was focused on keeping my soul in my body. Which wasn’t an easy feat in the slightest, and I wanted to just completely shut down, collapse into a small ball in bed as I listened to a random podcast episode and cried. But for that, I would have to hang up the call, and I couldn’t do that. Even if I didn’t like what she was saying, I loved the sound of her voice. It was soothing, I needed it.
Or rather, my physical body needed it, but my soul needed something else entirely. It needed to be anywhere else but this conversation about someone taking a space I apparently would have loved to have, and yet, I needed it to pilot my body.
It was a tug of war, and in the end, my body won. I stayed on the call and felt like dying the whole time.
“I never thought this was going to happen,” she said.
And there was probably a reason for that skepticism. That much seemed obvious. Ellie was a reasonable person. She lived her life according to rationality. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand it. She wasn’t answerable to me.
“Well, sometimes things just work out,” I said because I thought I needed to say something. It seemed like it was my turn to speak.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” she replied.
I cringed at the light rebuke. I didn’t particularly enjoy saying the wrong thing, but I usually did regardless.
“I’ve been working on myself, and well, being alone never bothered me, but it’s not something I want,” Ellie tried to explain.
And even if her explanation was clear, it didn’t make sense to me. It felt like a personal attack, like I had somehow caused this. And maybe–if this man made her as happy as she sounded–then I should have felt some sense of pride that I did. After all, I wanted her to be happy. I did stupid things to try to make that happen. I poured myself empty and then less than empty to make it happen. But when faced with an instance of it happening, I was suddenly not thrilled. I was upset. I was hurt. I was about to cry. I was fighting an out of body experience because my soul was so unwilling to put up with another moment of this.
While she continued her counter of an idea I had half-heartedly put forth, I listened and nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. It didn’t make sense, but this is what it means to be artificial, to be going through motions you don’t fully understand. And that’s what I was doing. That’s how I was moving through the current moment. I was just passing through. Nothing mattered. Nothing felt real.
But that isn’t how a human mind is meant to be. That’s not the sort of thing a mind is able to tolerate for an extended period of time. It needs stimulation. It craves some sort of sensory escape from whatever storm happens in the mind. And so, I rose to my feet, leaving behind the kitchen table and part of my soul. At first, I didn’t know where to go, but I felt a pull towards the sunroom with closed curtains blocking the room’s view of the property’s small creek. I had pulled those curtains shut one day and never opened them again. Though the view was tranquil and had a picturesque beauty to it, the sight still turned my stomach for one inexplicable reason or another. The curtains were a quick solution. But in a house so silent and with nothing else to do, staring at the small creek was suddenly appealing. For all its lack of charm, it was better than the blank void of my mind.
I didn’t fully pull the curtain back, though. The curtain rod and the rings holding up the material were quick to catch on unseen barriers, and I wasn’t in the mood to fight. So I pulled the curtains back just enough for a small peek out.
The sun hadn’t fully set yet. It was retreating, but enough of it lingered to bask the stream in a pale, faint glow. It looked beautiful, impossibly so, just like Ellie.
Meanwhile, she kept talking. She kept telling me about this new man in her life, twisting my soul with each word and stabbing me with each giggle. That wasn’t a fair reaction, on my part, but it was part of my reaction.
Despite what I felt physically, I was happy for Ellie. I really was. I could tell she was happy, and I valued her happiness more than I did my own. But while all of that remained true, I was still miserable. I still got off the phone with her–without cutting the call short despite my breaking heart–and wept. Only when the tears flowed did I look away from the creek, from the water gracefully meandering across the yard into the woods where I would never dare to follow. It had abandoned me as well.
For that moment, the silence of the house didn’t bother me. I was grateful for it because it meant I didn’t have to explain to anyone why I was sobbing because my friend found someone to love and who loved her. And it had to be a functional relationship, right? This was Ellie: the queen of impeccable judgment. She wouldn’t settle for anything less. Ellie knew her worth.
But all the same, it felt like I was losing her. And maybe it wasn’t about this random dude in her life but about the gradual pulling apart we had been going through. This blow might have only been noteworthy because it was the last one, not because there was any sort of style or weight to the strike.
After about ten minutes, the tears dried up. I grabbed a bottle of water from the kitchen either to rehydrate myself or to see if the tear ducts were still inclined to flow and just needed more water to make it happen. Honestly, I wasn’t fully sure what I was doing. Nothing made sense. My mind had shut off. Processing the news had been a lot to ask of it, but it had handled it and now needed to rest.
But then Chris texted me. It was an innocent enough text, just checking if I had dinner because he was at Pasta Pizzaz, and he knew how much I liked the food there. Making sure I ate was one of the many ways he expressed love, which was incredibly obvious, but that wasn’t the time for even the smallest displays of care considering I was currently crying about someone else, specifically that someone else’s romantic endeavors. And I could tell myself I didn’t love Ellie that way I loved Chris all I wanted, but the tears that streamed down my face told a very different story. I might not have loved her in that way, but I loved her enough that I both couldn’t tell Chris about her but also needed to.
Right then, as I was staring at his message, I should have realized my ethical duties. I should have either told Chris about Ellie or negated my responsibilities to him by ending things. But I didn’t want to do either. While those desires should have been irrelevant, they were all I could think about. I was raw. I was in pain. By some counts, I was entirely in survival mode, and to survive the storm that was swallowing me up, I needed Chris.
Come over, I begged. With or without food. I just need to see you.
I did need him. It wasn’t a lie so much as it was a telling of the least relevant truth. The silence of the house was getting overwhelming. I could hear my light sobs echoing through the halls. My soul was still trying to escape my body. Nothing in me felt real. I felt like a cloud, a vision, a dream, or just something ethereal that would drift away if I wasn’t properly tethered. I was coming apart, and I knew Chris could pull me back together. When Chris held me, touched me, perceived me, I came together. I became a version of Mia that was somewhat tolerable to be around.
But that was all entirely undeserved, wasn’t it? I had a sneaking suspicion that I was being unfaithful to Chris, that my emotional dependence on Ellie was a line crossed that I only excused because I was the one benefiting from my misbehavior. Ellie didn’t love me in that way, I could say, but if she told me that she did, I couldn’t say what I would do. That knowledge was the dagger. This wound on his body was unseen but bleeding. And still, I asked Chris to come to me.
Worse yet, he did.