Free Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer OConnell

As each day passed, as each week became a month and I failed to act, I was making a choice. As I look back over the other best friendships I’ve had that also ended, I wonder if, in addition to simply having a finite amount of room for such intimacy, we also have certain periods in our lives in which we seek out people who seem to embody the things we lack. Then, when we gain those things for ourselves, we no longer need that friend in the same way, which causes a serious dissonance in the relationship. Perhaps this is why these particular friendships burn so bright and then disappear so completely.
    What I desperately admired about T. was her strength in worlds that confused and scared me. She was so capable. Successful. Alternatively, I was a complete mess and decidedly unsuccessful at anything that did not involve lying on my couch eating chocolate and watching Buffy. As I climbed my way out of the depression of my twenties, I found that I wasn’t as messy as I thought. And that as it turned out, I had the chance to be successful in my own right. When this happened, I think the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction for our friendship. The last thing I needed was a friend who seemed to treat me as if I was the same person I’d been before. That messed-up, ruined girl I’d finally put behind me. And I think one of the things T. needed very much was to be needed.
    I think we simply outgrew each other.
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    When I was in high school, I had a best friend who was closer to me than members of my actual family. J. and I were ridiculously, disastrously close. We called each other the Death Twins, to indicate both our bond and our oh-so-jaded outlook on life. (Which is hilarious when I look back at my preppy self, complete with pegged jeans. I was about as jaded as a wide-eyed singing and dancing Disney cartoon.) J. and I were so tight that when we drove around with her boyfriend, he was banished to the backseat so as not to disturb our bond.
    Then college intervened. We separated and found other friends in our separate colleges. We fought bitterly (and one night, memorably, with our hands) and didn’t speak for a long time. Years, I think.
    And here’s the difference between Best Friendships and Actual Romantic Relationships: In the former, you really can have space. Years of it, if necessary, and then sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find your way back.
    J. wrote me a Christmas card years later, and in so doing, reactivated our friendship. We will never be as claustrophobically, suffocatingly close as we were in high school. Instead, we can be friends. At last.
    I think about this a lot when I think about T. and wonder why our relationship followed the trajectory it did.
    There are things that I know about myself that I would never have learned without T. in my life. Some of those things are incredibly unpleasant, it’s true, but that might be what friends are for. There were times when she seemed to be the only thing between me and a great darkness I feared I might get lost in. We were silly together in a way I have never re-created with another friend and don’t imagine I ever will. I miss the stories that only she knows, the jokes that only she gets. As I wrote somewhere else, losing a friend is like losing a language, and I miss the one we spoke together. I loved her with the whole of my heart, and I can’t regret that. There is no reason not to imagine that some day one of us will reach out, the other will be receptive, and we will reaccess that intricate, secret world that we shared.
    Although, let’s hope, in a less all-consuming fashion.
    It is also possible that T. and I will never reconnect, never so much as speak again, and that’s fine, too. I don’t wish her ill. Quite the opposite. I like to think she’s out there wielding that smile of hers like a weapon behind lush MAC cosmetics. I hope the husband she chose is worth the wonderful woman I knew