Phone Call

It was so long ago now, and I want to set this memory down before it fades for good. We had both landed jobs, she and her friend starting theirs together, and since their start date came before mine, I offered to drop them to the new office in my car. Naive, and every bit the overprotective friend, I walked in and sat with them in the waiting lounge until their names were called, before slipping out. We were unofficially dating for close to a year back then, unofficial because she already had an official boyfriend (I still can’t quite explain how I talked myself into that one). The second day she came back from office, she told me she’d been offered a transfer to another city, and had taken it. I was surprised. I thought things were going well between us. She said long distance happened to everyone, that it would come naturally to us. We were only six hours apart, after all.

A month later, she moved. A few days into the new city, the calls and texts stopped coming. I told myself this was just her settling in, that I should give her room and not be the clingy one. When she did call, she’d talk about how wonderful her roommates and neighbors were, roommates who were flight attendants, neighbors who worked in tech like me, everyone hanging out, drinking, having the time of their lives.

A month after that, the calls all but disappeared. Unanswered. Unreturned. I didn’t know what to do with the confusion, or the anger quietly stacking up inside me. Some nights I doubted myself instead, telling myself to calm down, that this was simply who she was, that out of sight didn’t have to mean out of mind, that we were still friends regardless. It’s strange, looking back, that whatever clusterfuck of a relationship we had, I kept calling it “friendship” in my head, mostly because I couldn’t think of a saner word for it.

I was walking out of the college food hall when I tried calling her again, and for once she picked up, sounding irritated before I’d even said much. I complained, a little, about how little attention I was getting. She snapped back, called me clingy, said I’d become too emotional for her to deal with. And for one of the very rare times in my life, I lost my shit. Not because she didn’t care anymore, but because I could feel that she had already moved on and left me hanging there, without the courage to just say it to my face. I was furious, mostly at myself, and I spent the month after sulking and drinking every night, until I couldn’t carry it any further. That’s when this blog was born. It has held me together ever since.

Somewhere in between, she invited me to her city, to meet everyone. I didn’t want to see her face, wanted so badly to hate her, and couldn’t. Our friends had no idea what had actually gone on between us, since none of it had ever been official, so I had no choice but to gulp down blood and play normal. It was the hardest weekend I can remember. Not long after, she invited me to her wedding. The nerve of it. I said no, and my friends guilt-tripped me into going anyway, insisting I was one of her closest friends, so how could I not. I went. I remember sulking through most of the day, then slipping away in the afternoon with her roommate for a movie instead of sitting through the celebrations. I think the roommate knew exactly how I was feeling, because word had clearly reached her, even though I’d never said a thing myself.

Years later, I met her again, in her city in the US. She had separated by then, moved away from her closest friend after suspecting her of sleeping with her husband. She came to pick me up, and it was strange, we were meeting after ten years or more, yet she still carried this bitterness toward me. She drove us to an expensive place, told me she’d seen on my profile that I’d become some sort of leader in some org, and asked me to pay for both of us, twenty dollars a drink. I paid without a word, unsure what she was even trying to prove. She blamed her mother for the marriage, for pushing her into someone from within their own community. I stayed quiet. Some part of me wanted to tell her exactly how much she’d hurt me, for years, but I could see she was going through something hard of her own. When I offered to pay for dinner too, something in her seemed to give, guilt maybe, because this time she took me somewhere even more expensive, refused to let me pay a cent, and ordered far more food than I kept insisting we could ever finish. The bill came to two hundred and fifty dollars, and she paid every bit of it herself. We went back to her place, walked around the park nearby. When I finally said I’d just take a cab, she had already turned cold again. I was angry at her, for wrecking me the way she once had, and sad for her, all at the same time.

I decided I didn’t want to see her again. Her recklessness sent me down a rabbit hole I climbed out of slowly, over years. I’m not saying it was all her fault, but she was the first person who ever got past my walls, and when she walked away without a word, it took my whole emotional scaffolding down with her.

I want to remember exactly how she treated me. There were days she made me feel like the center of everything, and then there were the ones after, where she made me feel insignificant, maybe forever.

Did I do the same to others? I really hope not, but I can’t say for sure.