Advanced Best Friend Break Up

I'm putting something that I never completely tamed into storage because it hurts too much to stare it in the face and it's mortallywoundedbutnotdead. Like, it could still hurt me, badly. Like, some days, like yesterday, there's some moments where I feel like it might kill me.

Maybe it isn't storage. Maybe I have to put it down, like an ailing pet.  Maybe it's just ending the suffering. Maybe that's why it hurts so badly to take it apart. Because, for sure, this dismemberment feels more like a vivisection of myself, and to be honest, I only like to do that to make sure I am still tender enought to feel the pain. As a necessity, it sucks.

And, sure, I like to keep the mounted heads of my dead relationships within easy touring distance but I have never been a DIY taxidermist. I let time and memory take care of that and later, I pull out the lion's skin that is The Stories and wear it like a mantle, like a trophy of That Time I Survived My Own Choices and throw myself a little tickertape parade whenever I feel closed in and sad. Or happy. Or brave.

I digress.

This mercy killing is to keep it from recovering and going feral and changing who I am and changing love into something as dirty and small and unhappy and soiled as it feels now. When I look at the sad pile of parts that will be left, I will feel like a murderer, not a survivor. Doesn't mean I can stop.

But yeah, anyway, it isn't easy, pinning down, dismantling, and unpacking a decade of love and loyalty. It isn't easy taking a whole human person that you know and making them into a stranger. An acquaintance to whom you owe nothing but manners and niceness. I'm not very good at being nice. I am very good at being loyal but that was kinda the lightning bolt catalyst, so it's nothing to brag about. Makes me wish I were nicer, a thing I never wish. Maybe I wouldn't be in this situation. If I were nicer.

It's even worse when they have no idea what you're feeling, because they never knew, really. And you have to realize that and unpick the stitches in places you sewed together wounds and patched tears with excuses you made for bad behaviour and justification for ignorance and feel stupid for the energy you spent.

I'll just say it plainly, ugly as the butchery I am engaging in: she picked him, not me. She picked her own perspective, not me. She picked the warm immediate gratification of whispering secrets and creating intimacy with someone else's story, not me. Maybe it was knowingly illicit and maybe just because it was a Person to Trust and that behaves like a pair of blinders. It doesn't matter.

I get to be righteously angry and feel betrayed that her quivering and fuzzy feefees for some quasi stranger meant more to her than 10 damn years of being humans together in the most chaotic visceral challenging ugly silly ways. It doesn't help much. It doesn't stop the salty tears, constantly flowing, like the ocean, and I wonder if there could ever be enough of either to help my hands or my heart feel clean again.

I am angry that people don't treat this the way they do any other break up. When I was going crazy for information about any ex, when I wanted to KNOW, just tell me, because it would make me feel better, people treated me like what I was: an addict, looking for a fix. They would advise that what I was doing was unhealthy.

That never once stopped me. But maybe because I was working with a net and a harness and EMTs standing by with bandaids and shots and dance parties--I knew they saw me exhibiting absurd behaviours and would only let me fall so far.

They don't do that when it's just a friend and you're trying to unsolder them from your soul. They offer these bits freely: it's just a taste, it doesn't cost you anything.
There's no net between you and that churning well of loss and a free fall into the water is like a fall into concrete from this height, even the people who try to comfort you and ask if you're OK don't know whether or not to believe you're actually done.

Because you will forgive her, because that's what you do. Because you need to just talk about it because you just should know because they're used to telling you, because they can't see that you feel like the creature gasping for air you always talk about being and you're in the waves and gravity is supposed to be neutral and meaningless but you can feel the drop and realize that maybe there was a net after all and you're caught in it and that's why you're drowning this time.

She's acting like such a poser. I never liked her and she put this on Facebook the other day and I am so glad I can finally tell you how stupid I think she is.

-you would not have dared say that to me when our friendship was alive and wild and a thing I fiercely nurtured, why would you say that to me now.-

Why is she getting all these tattoos all of sudden? Who does she think she is?

-the exact same person she always was; why does it matter to you?-

She's smoking weed all the time now.

-it was hard enough to watch her Batesian attempts to match the people she wanted to please when i wasn't trying to cut out a part of myself. i don't need to know, thank you.-

Has she fucked that guy she's always tagging on Facebook yet?

-no words here, just burst into tears.-

Stop.
Take a breath. Close your eyes. Find your center.

Now take that next step on the balance beam or the tight rope or the metaphor. Ready? Ok.

You are not killing something healthy and vibrant. You are cutting away a chimera of graveyard parts and optimism and pity and choices that long ago overtook anything organic and living. Nothing wants to die but there is a time to ev'ry purpose under Heaven. There's still love, hidden under all the ugly bits and pieces you're going to grind into meal, into nothing, into sand, and nobody can take that from you. All the bits you throw away? The waves will wear them down until all that's left is the sound of the crash and a memory.

So take that next step and the next cut. Even if you plummet down end over end, you don't need to worry about a net because the waves and the sky are your homes, equally, in different ways. In your bones, you know you are a bird and a fish and a beating heart and enough. This is just a forced perspective illusion built by pain and the mad science behind a soft and well-meaning thesis predicated on the idea no one should be alone and you could fix that. All the donated parts in the world could not make this happen. And so now, mourn. And then lay it to rest.