1.29.2013

A Girl I Used to Know

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.