Life is littered with first times and last times. Meetings and
goodbyes are an everyday occurrence. We stop in at Starbucks to grab an
espresso and there are dozens of opportunities to have a first
conversation with whomever happens to be in line with you. Chances are
this conversation, as grand as it was, will be your last conversation
with that person. So it goes. If you're lucky enough to have a first
conversation move on to the next conversation and you're still thinking
it was grand, most likely you've become friends.
Friends
are an interesting breed of human interaction. With these select folk,
we choose to explore life with. We choose to expose our inner most
thoughts, our flaws, our secrets, and maybe most importantly our truths.
There are your "besties," your drinking buddies, your work friends,
your uni friends etc. These people are closer to us than our family
because of the simple fact that we chose them.
As time
goes by you will find your frequency of interactions with some of these
people slowly dimenish until eventually your last conversation has come
upon you. Usually your last conversation with a friend is
unintentional. You don't mean to never talk to them again. Life has
simply taken you in different directions. Its interesting to think what
you would have said to that friend you had in 3rd grade at the end of
the school year, had you known you were moving away; To that friend you
called to tell them you just missed visiting hours, had you known they
weren't going to make it through the night. What would you say if you
knew that THIS was your last conversation with a person you have chosen
to be a part of you.
Then it happens, you find yourself
in the middle of a conversation with the rarest of all human
friendships, your friend soul mate. If ever you have the sheer privilage
of experiencing one of these consider yourself extremely lucky. I know I
definitely did. With this friend you barely have to talk because they
already know what it is you're about to say. This person reveals things
that you never knew about yourself, or you did but you just didn't want
to admit it to yourself. Your connection goes beyond explaination it
simply is.
For me, I found this relationship extra helpful
because I've never been someone who can properly communicate verbally
the things I want to say. I would open my mouth and hear the
discombobulated prose that would
stream forth from my vocal chords all the while thinking "Shit, that's
not right. How do I rephrase this?" Before I could even begin to
rephrase she would spit back to me what she knew I actually wanted to
say. I've always been a picture person. Even though pictures are worth a
thousand words, they're some things words can't describe. That's why
I'm an editor, I best communicate my thoughts through pictures.
Oscar
Wilde once said "A true friend stabs you in the front." How true this
is. They know exactly where to stick the knife, in order to cause the
most damage the fastest. The worst part is, you CHOSE to trust them with
this proverbial knife and road map. The damage is so deliberate and
deep that it will never scab. Scabs heal and eventually fade away but
scars are with you forever. When this happens, you are left with no
other choice than to deliberately have your last conversation.
Can
you imagine the internal dialogue? The desire to make this conversation
stick. The very real frustration of knowing that there is nothing you
can say to make them feel the same amount of hurt that they caused you.
The already jumbled and hard to reach vocabulary now essentially
unobtainable in the tornado of different thoughts and feelings. You try
to prepare what you're going to say but then you find yourself standing
there basically speechless. Unable to communicate with the amount of
contrived hatred that you know she's more than capable of. You hear
yourself say things completely childish and essentially more damaging to
you than her. You come off looking like the immature asshole simply
because you knew it was your last conversation and you wanted to make it
good. You knew you weren't good at expressing yourself verbally but you
had to at least try. Because somewhere deep down inside that monster
standing in front of you, there's a girl you used to know. A girl who
could take your ill thought out sentences and understand what you were
trying to say. That girl who knew all your truths, all your secrets and
you knew hers.
My last conversation may not have gone
exactly the way I planned, but I know that some day she'll find that
girl I used to know and she'll tell her all the things I wish I knew how
to say.
