It’s sad when a friendship ends.  In some respects, we’ve all lost many friends over the course of our lives, some had bigger impact than others though.  I have a few friendships that have stuck for what seems like forever and cherish them even more because of it.  One friendship I have had for 15 years.  It’s my longest friendship.  It was, I should say.  Once a month I’ve been sending a text and shooting an email… a smile or a hope you and yours are well kind of thing.  Very light.  It’s been 8 months since we last spoke.  And it turns out, the end of the friendship isn’t over what I thought it was.  It was because I said something that was taken in a mean light.  I had said I deserved better… and trailed off.  He took this in the worst way possible – in a way I certainly would NEVER mean.  What I meant was I deserve better – in that I don’t deserve to have a ton of additional drama thrown in my lap.  No.. dang … Even that’s not right.  What I should have said… was how scared I was.  How I had every single person piling every single stress and problem on me all at once.  How I couldn’t take anything more.  That the straw the camel was already carrying was threatening to break it’s back, and taking on anything additional would be suicide.  And that I had already handled soo much… I felt I deserved better than to constantly deal with all the stress of everyone’s problems.  I didn’t say it that way then.  I fumbled over my words.  I assumed he understood – he usually did.  I said it the right way tonight.  I said a lot tonight.  I apologized and explained what I meant.  I said how my feelings and goals and direction hasn’t changed, that I’m finding happiness, that I’ve learned a lot about communication since then, that I’ve grown and matured from the lessons I learned from him, but that I miss his friendship.  I miss having that person to talk to who’d never judge or think poorly of you.  Who learned how you think and act, and understood.  Now, had he returned any of my communication, I could have said all of this a lot sooner… but it doesn’t matter now.  He is walking away from a 15 year friendship.  He is Broken.  I could almost feel the cold in his voice.  And I feel, truly, awful about it.  I tried to remind him that it’s when your world is in the darkest depths that you have to try and make your own light.  Believe you’ll find your way through.  Life can be cruel with it’s timing.  His life has been a whirl wind of tests thrown at him, so I can’t blame him for it entirely.

But….

I’m not upset.  I’ve known for 6 months that our friendship was over – I’ve mourned it for a while. In fact, I’m shocked to find out it was my big mouth fumbling that was the nail in the coffin.  I mean – this is me!  Sometimes, I fumble… those closest to me, know it’s never with ill intent.  And here’s the strange thing… i’m also kind of annoyed.  He pointed out that he knew me better than anyone… well if that’s true – then wouldn’t you have thought – gee, Jen’s never cruel, she’s not going to say I’m worthless..she must mean something else… hence she’s calling me and trying to explain.  We’ve never had this kind of thing happen before…. but nooooo.  His solution is to walk away and pretend that the friendship just wasn’t there.  That hurts.  UGH.  Communication will be the death of me I swear.  LOL.