Some things are hard not to take personally. A friend cutting off all contact mid-WhatsApp conversation and not bothering to resume contact for over a year (one year, five months, one week, six days, nineteen hours, fourty minutes and thirty-four seconds to be obsessively precise), I find very hard not to take personally. At this point, I should really stop calling her a friend, but without know why it is that she broke off all communication, it seems impossible for me to call her “a person that I used to know.”
To be fair, I shouldn’t be too surprised. I met her a little after she moved to the Netherlands, over a decade ago, and I was a bit surprised at how easily she broke off contact with her friends from back home. She’s moved again, and I guess now I’m the friend she no longer contacts now that she’s abroad.
I’ve resisted the urge to contact her since she stopped talking to me (made easier by no longer being on Facebook) because it’s clear she has no interest in keeping in touch. I’ve gone through all the stages of grief and loss; denial, anger, blah blah, acceptance. Strangely enough, these stages seem oddly cyclical, where I inevitably end up at stage one again. Admittedly, I’m getting very efficient and nowadays I get to acceptance in a matter of minutes. I linger at acceptance for a couple of weeks and start the cycle all over again.
The reason why I don’t just stick to acceptance is because I have no fucking clue why she stopped talking to me. While I can come up with two or three dozen things I have done to deserve it, and perhaps half a dozen other possible reasons, I don’t really know why. There’s no closure. I’ve never actually experienced that lack of closure before, so that’s something I’ve learnt from all of this.
See, every cloud has a silver lining; one of my closest and dearest friends has abandoned all desire of maintaining a relationship with me, but at least now I know what all those dramatic romance films keep harping on about.
