Goodbye, friend

I’ve been thinking a lot about friends. The ways they come and go. The ways we let them go. The friends who disappear from our lives, sometimes for decades, and come back. The friends who won’t come back.

I used to have what I called a Saturday breakfast friend. We settled into a routine: he’d pick me up or I’d walk to meet him at a nearby restaurant, often at one of the downtown hotels, or across the river in St. Boniface. We liked to try different places. Hotel restaurants were favourites because we could help ourselves to a free newspaper and, if there was a pool, sit where we’d get a whiff of chlorine now and then. It made us feel like we were on holidays, visitors from somewhere else. Like we didn’t walk and drive and see these streets, these places, all the time.

One of my favourite breakfast spots was The Radisson hotel restaurant. It was on the twelfth floor and we could sit along large windows and look to the north out on our city, at some of its oldest architecture. I’d order scrambled eggs, sometimes with turkey bacon. My friend liked eggs benedict. He’d try it at the various restaurants we’d visit, on a quest to judge which place did them best. We both hated that little white squiggly thing in the eggs—that’s why I always ordered my eggs scrambled. I knew it was there but if I couldn’t see it, I didn’t have to think about it. I sometimes saw my friend isolate the white thing on his plate and push it aside. It’s called the chalaza, I’ve since learned. It holds the yolk in place. Keeps it centred. Once, at the Radisson, I watched him bring his fork to his mouth and there was the chalaza, dangling. I swallowed hard. I didn’t say anything. Why would I? The eggs benedict was good at the Radisson.

One Saturday morning, heading out to a different spot, I lugged along my six volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and after breakfast we went upstairs to a spacious seating area within the exposed brick walls of the more than a century old building, and I posed for photos with my stack of books. I had finished reading them a week earlier and I wanted to mark the accomplishment—although it was an English translation that I’d read so is that really Proust? I wanted to post the pictures on social media. Proof.

We laughed so much that morning, taking those photos.

Our Saturday breakfasts are in the past now. He texted me a misogynistic joke one day and I tried to ignore it, and he kept poking, and finally I responded. His last words to me were “every conversation with you is like walking a mine field.”

If there were mines, weren’t they clearly labelled, not hidden at all, especially a big one like that? Had he blown up our friendship on purpose? I couldn’t say for sure but I knew that we had long before stopped listening to each other.

Are there signs when a friendship is about to end? Sometimes, if we want to see them. Other times, we can be blindsided, left wondering what happened. There isn’t always an explosion.

A good friend ghosted me once and it surprised me. We had been close for several years. I was hurt and confused by it for a long time. I had suspicions about why she dropped me so suddenly but I didn’t want to believe our friendship had been so superficial. Then the words of someone who knew us both were repeated to me: she didn’t want friends, she wanted fans. Oh, how faithfully I had fulfilled that role, until one day I struck out on my own, left the entourage—a sin that was, I now know, unforgiveable.

Cruelly, not much later, I did the same thing. I ghosted a friend I had known for years. We had come in and out of each others’ lives over a couple of decades. We didn’t live in the same city anymore so it was easy. I just stopped returning her calls. I had a lot to deal with at the time, and I told myself I couldn’t deal with her too. Sometimes I think about her and wish I knew where she was now—I tried looking her up once and didn’t find her—so I could, if nothing else, tell her I’m sorry.

Recently I met some friends I grew up with, some of the first friends I ever had, to travel to a small town to say a final goodbye. Some of us hadn’t seen each other for decades. I thought of Proust’s narrator when, near the end of the story, he goes to a party, sees old friends and is confused by what at first he thinks are disguises—powdered wigs and applied wrinkles.

It takes a moment to adjust, to see your oldest friends as they are now, older, like you are. But it’s only a moment and you’re able to see past the disguises, and it’s as if they melt away and reveal the same people you’ve always been. The same first graders who lined up at a small country school the first day, and the same twelfth graders who dressed up and posed for a graduation picture. Who’s not here, you try to figure out, thinking of that picture, and you count yourselves and who might be missing. And you realize one of the missing people is the one you came to say a final goodbye to today.

Let’s not do this again, you all agree. Let’s not say goodbye. And you all pretend that you’ll keep that promise forever.