About a year ago today, you sent me a text in a last-ditch effort to ensure that the holes in our friendship of [redacted] years weren’t enough to sink us all. Or that maybe I hadn’t abandoned ship - a fear or vice you’d single out in others. Mine was trust - yours, abandonment.

I still think about you - how could I not? There are some of your qualities in me, and I’d be remiss to say that you didn’t take part in a lot of my small decisions that ultimately ballooned into components of my habits today. I’d even go so far as saying that I miss you, and that at one point, I light-heartedly agreed that, indeed, as you said so many years ago, our kids would go to Disney together.

But there was so much of the bad. And it’d be negligent to place fault, because ultimately our friendship had run its course. But I stayed because of cowardice. Because of my own avoidance of confrontation, and because of your self-destructive past.

A few months ago, I found an email I’d sent to a friend and sister, written in 2005 or 2006, and I had no idea I’d been capable of such rage. As much as you brought out the drive, compassion, and curiosity in me, you also brought out the worst moments of vertigo. You were, as I remembered, a catalog of complexes. It worried me, and as I’d diligently done for more than a decade with others, I held your hand. I played therapist because I’d do that - get too involved.

I remember 2005 when I thought to myself that I empathized too much with others. That’s not healthy. Not when things were turning okay for me, but when you cried, I cried, and felt a lump of coal in my throat for you. And the revelation that you’d lied to me later down the line. Your drama ultimately became mine and it consumed me - but it was only because I allowed it to.

Then later, as the months and years passed, the world was your stage and I would vacillate between conveniently avoiding you and assessing: “maybe I’ll keep you in my life.” Because I loved you as a friend - I really did, but I also hated how unstable you were. How upon meeting you, you were the strong one, who picked up after herself. But I don’t know when or what happened down the line, but you broke. We broke.

“You paid your dues;” “It’s better without her;” I’d be told. Because the hours, the years, furnished the guilt in me. Could I have done better or was it just because it ran its course? Either way, if you’re reading this, I hope you’ve found your way.