On and off like clockwork, every six months, I look for you.  I google you, your old screen name, your real name, your maiden name.  I wonder how you are. I wonder where your life is now. 

For a long time I never found you.  Old journal entries, old youtube videos, but never anything recent.

Today I found you. Now and here and present. You’re on facebook. I stare at the picture of you and your husband and my heart breaks.

There are days that I miss you so terribly I cry. There are days that I’m so angry at myself for letting things fall apart the way they did.  There are days that I’m furious with you for pushing us away. 

We still talk about you…at times melancholy, and at times angry. 

My heart aches and my mouse hovers over the ‘send message’ button. Even if I could push past my own pride, what would I say? It has been two years this month since things came to an end between us. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t easy. I still have a hole in my heart where you used to reside.  It’s still an open wound, jagged and raw.

Do you think of us? Do you search for us?  Do you miss us?  Or did you just stop caring all together? Are we just a distant memory that annoys you?

I still wonder what happened.  How such a friendship could crumble. Why you feared that WE would be mad at the path your life took? Of all people. Why you felt that you couldn’t trust us with the truth. Why we didn’t search for it sooner. Could things have ended differently if we’d spoken up months before we did?  Or if we’d just remained blindly ignorant and let things totally slide by.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Was our friendship real?  If it was, how could it end like that?