This stupid Buzzfeed article keeps popping up and bothering me.
Things like ‘you have horrible pictures of each other’ and every sentence starts with ‘remember when?’
Having old friends is great. I love the few old friends I still have (shout out to one who just got engaged this week!). But the truth is that I don’t have many of them. My first best friend, I love her but she has her own life, arguably both more exciting and more mature than mine. I see her when I can (and love it) but even when we were small it never felt like we were each others highest priorities. We’d take a picture together at a bar mitzvah and then immediately run off to our other friends. We were admittedly best friends of convenience in a class that had three girls in it.
The next girl I called my best friend is full of the testing, the emotional betrayal and the underhanded digs that you’d expect from Regina George. I look back on the time together and see myself as the victim. I’m sure the moments I pushed back live on in her memory as the abuses she had to endure. And while I do remember my aching need to show her my undying loyalty to her, the memory of it brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from We Need To Talk About Kevin,
Before you condemn me utterly, I beg you to understand how hard I’d been trying to be a good mother. But trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one. [x]
When we graduated and weren’t physically close anymore it took us about a year of pretending to still care before she sent me a long, accusatory email, dismissing me from her life. I had just moved into a new apartment that day and I remember reading her message, a smidgen of heat rising to my face and then just deleting it and thinking how quick and painless that long overdue breakup was.
It’s the friends who I’ve made since then who I feel are worth keeping.
My roommate from college who I think of literally daily.
The friends who live in other cities and who I’ve started sending postcards to.
The friends I’ve made since my dad died. Who were there, who listened to everything good and bad that spewed out of me and are still a part of my life.
And the common thread is me. Maybe I’m just better at being a friend now than I was in the past. Maybe I care more about doing a decent job at it.
So take that Buzzfeed!