The Story of the Lost Friend

N. West Moss

Painting by Rebecca Johnson

Word Count 1077

I had a coworker (I’ll call her Mary) at my last job whom I liked from the start, and came also to admire. She worked hard, seemed kind. We ate lunch together every day, spoke about our husbands, our boss, our jobs, our hopes. We shared secrets, even. We became friends … or so I thought.

I was several years into this job when my mother went into hospice. I took a leave of absence from work to care for her. Human Resources cautioned me not to check my work email, but I stayed in limited touch with Mary via text, keeping her abreast of what was happening. When I told her that I was thinking of quitting my job, she told me not to tell her, that she found it hard to keep secrets from our boss, and so we fell out of contact for a few months.

When my mother died, Mary sent a text saying, “Sorry.” My mind was occupied by other things, but several weeks went by, and still, I heard nothing more from her. I was busy, of course, and mourning, but in the back of my mind, I was wondering, Where is Mary? My friends were stepping up in lovely ways, checking on me, sending soup and flowers and cat videos, but Mary was conspicuously absent. A month or two later, when the dust had begun to settle, I reached out to her and asked if she could meet for coffee. Her answers took time in coming, and were always a polite “No.” Finally, she stopped responding altogether.

I suppose it should have been obvious to me by then that she just didn’t want to be friends with me, but I speculated that maybe she was going through things with her health and her marriage, both of which had been filled with struggles. I calmed myself by thinking that Mary still spoke about her own mother’s death, decades earlier, with great emotion, and maybe that’s why she couldn’t be present for my own mourning.

An entire year passed, during which I often found my mind drifting to Mary. I relitigated everything. I thought of the many times I’d invited her to my house, invitations she had never taken me up on. I wondered if my unhappiness at work had made her miserable, and that maybe she was happier without me there. When I sometimes awoke in the middle of the night to peer into the abyss, I wondered if I was disgusting in some way. Or maybe we had never been friends, but had just been work colleagues.

When I finally accepted that Mary did not want to be friends, I was gutted. It made me question other friendships. Was Jane really a friend, or was she just being polite? Was Mike my friend, or was he friendly because he sometimes worked for me? It was destabilizing to realize I had misunderstood so profoundly and for so long. I decided to post something about this on social media and was surprised to learn that a lot of people (mostly, but not exclusively, women) share this kind of ambiguous loss around friendship. Dozens of people shared examples of their friendship break-ups, referring to them alternately as confusing, devastating, hurtful, and heartbreaking. Several said it had been more painful to lose a close friend than it had been to navigate their own divorces, more painful than the deaths of their parents, and that they were left wondering what they had done to sour a friendship that at one point meant so much to them.

I finally sent a brief email to Mary that said while I was sad we weren't in touch, I thought she was a stunning, wonderful coworker and human being. That's the truth underneath the confusion and sorrow. If I didn't think she was terrific in many ways, I wouldn't be so sad. Sending that email made me feel a little bit better.

Mary isn’t the only friend I’ve lost in this way. Twenty years ago, we staged an intervention for one of my closest college friends. He and I had lived in Brooklyn together after college, had traveled together and even worked together. I still send letters to him via his mother, wishing him safety, reminding me of my love. I don’t know if he receives them, and if he does, whether or not he reads them, and while I know from his mother that he is alive, in the twenty years since the intervention, I have never heard a single word from him. Still, I think about him almost every day, and even now, I harbor the hope that he will one day return to me, foolish though I know that hope to be.

We have endless books and songs and movies and paintings about the many stages of romantic love, but hardly anything nuanced or helpful about the phases that friendships go through. In Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, her character goes into the British Museum and realizes that all of the books surrounding her, so many about women. Are most stories about romantic, sexual love because men are (to generalize greatly) less interested in the subtleties and nuance of friendship?

Women are often the more adept weavers of the social fabric of friendship, but we’re forced to drink from an overflowing trough about mostly hetero romance, when what occupies our minds and hearts, are the ways in which we are fed by our friends. I suspect this dearth of material goes some way in explaining the popularity of the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan novels, beginning with My Brilliant Friend, a book which, for me was largely about the subtle longings and power shifts of all friendships and the thousand ways we can be injured by them, momentarily, and for a lifetime.

How come I’ve never listened to a song about the breakup of a friendship that brought me to tears? How come I’ve never written one? I want more art, more songs and movies and novels about the specific way that friendships nourish us more deeply than almost anything else, and the ways in which their loss can cause our worlds to tilt and wobble like nothing else.

N. West is the author of The Subway Stops at Bryant Park (Leapfrog Press), Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life (Algonquin), and Birdy (forthcoming from Christy Ottaviano at Little, Brown)