Abandoned Goodbyes

May 16

I am in 3rd grade. I purchase a pair of splatter-painted neon keds at the Walmart with my mom, and I am very proud. I wear them to school the next day. My best friends are Rachel and Alex, and Rachel takes it upon herself to correct my error in fashion. “If you wear those again we won’t be your friends anymore.” Alex stands by silently not challenging her words, not defending my right to wear neon shoes in the 3rd grade. Just letting the chips fall as they would, sure not to end up on the wrong side of things. Alone is a scary place to be.

I’m offended, my sensibility around injustice already developed, and I struggle with what to do. I did not want to be alone either, but I also did not want someone to tell me how to express myself. I do not wear the shoes, but I harbor a kernel of resentment very near the surface of my skin. I know that our friendship has become fatally flawed.

Sprit week rolls around. The theme is “Beach Attire.” I wear the neon shoes.

Rachel and Alex were not my friends after that.

*****

It is 8th grade now. I am lonely. I don’t know how to stop being sad.

My closest friends have gotten into the habit of yelling “everlasting” at the top of their lungs, then doubling over in laughter when we’re all together. I do not know why they do this. I ask over and over again what it means, knowing in the pit of my stomach it is an inside joke made at my expense without even the decency to make it behind my back, but no matter how many times I asked, no one will tell me.

Until one night at a sleep over, my friend finally cracks and says, “Well you’re always so sad all the time, that someone thought maybe you are on an everlasting period.” She looks sheepish as she says so, knowing how explicitly cruel it was as the words materialized into being.

*****

It is 10th grade now. I swim in a haze of untreated depression. My parents probably notice, but don’t know how to fix it either, and so I am alone. I cope by reading book after book after book. The only drug I can easily access.

Relationship after relationship crumbles in the face of betrayal, inauthenticity, the black hole of my pain, and natural incompatibility.

I pass a note that calls a former friend a “wannabe slut” and another a "pizza face.”

One day they don’t show up to chemistry class, and my heart drops out of my chest, knowing what it meant for them all to be absent besides me. I am a cornered animal.

They hand the note to the principal posing as concerned citizens willing to do their moral duty. We all know they are as culpable as I am, but my culpability is in writing.

I am threatened with expulsion. I degrade myself to avoid it, an act of self-betrayal that stirs chaos in my life for years.

The principal forces us all to make up, and for a moment we do. My degradation enough grant me access to their inner circle once more.

But days later, I am alone again, the force of fake unity not strong enough to overcome the long history of disunity.

*****

I am at church. I have learned about a new way to communicate, a new way to be in friendship. I have healed my sad, and it’s only a visitor now, not a permanent resident. I have learned to validate my experience, and I desperately want to share it with my leader who calls me her friend. We have been working together for 3 years, teaching women about communication, active listening, gaslighting, abuse, and codependency.

I sit at a table with her and another leader who offered to help us communicate better with one another.

“The way I have learned to define friendship now includes care and interest in my life. What we have now pulls me into a codependent pattern. I have been living in the space of self-betrayal for a long time by not saying so,” I have mustered the bravery to say these words for what feels like a lifetime, but is likely only a few months.

“Nothing is good enough for you. Can’t you just be happy?” she replies.

“What I’m seeing in this situation is just a lot of immaturity on your part,” our friend says to me.

I restate myself.

“You don’t have to define friendship in the way that I do. I simply want to let you know how our relationship feels to me.”

“So many people need me.”

She lists them off one after the other, and uses it for proof that I am asking too much.

“This conversation isn’t getting anywhere and its feeling detrimental to me. I’d like to stop until I can handle my emotions better.”

We never speak in person again.

*****

I take my elderly cat outside. He has been wilting lately, not feeling well, puking a lot struggling to go to the bathroom, and I think some sun would do him good.

This cat alone has been the solitary relationship in which my heart has not broken into shatters. He has never betrayed me, never abandoned me, always approached me at the end of every day deeply content to love me no matter what I’ve done or said.

While I sit and watch him, I find the bravery to speak my truth on a public platform observing the brutal tactics of the deconstruction space after witnessing yet another public humiliation branded to the masses as accountability. Another attempt to direct the narrative of healing to things the imaginary board of directors deem appropriate, robbing us all of the capacity to decide for ourselves.

Public ire has a way of leaking on everyone. Guilt by association is real.

As I worked to calm my nervous system in meditation, my cat visited my mind. “Mom, I am ready to die. I would like you to help me.”

“I am too in my ego,” I say, feeling wildly afraid of the upcoming backlash, and of losing my most trusted companion, of having to muster the bravery to follow through with all the things that just happened, “I can’t trust myself. You’ll have to make it very clear for me.”

He walks out from behind a bush, tries to go to the bathroom to no avail, then throws up.

He visits my mind once more. “I hurt. Please help me.”

“Okay. I have to get through tomorrow and then I will,” I respond.

For a day I wade through comments, stories, and posts directed at my words, calling for softness here, instead of derision.To listening to contrary opinion. To slowness, kindness, non-duality, nuance.

“A white woman’s call for nuance is a sign of colonization.” “Nuance is loaded term. Are you sure you’re doing it right?” “Sure, I can be a little harsh, but at the end of the day keeping people from harm is the highest priority.” “How far can we get if you’re calling objective harm a matter of opinion?”

Words coming from content creators and licensed mental health professionals designed to maintain the comfort of the party they were constantly throwing themselves. “Another one has stepped out of line. Let’s show them what we stand for.”

And I watched tender relationships that I had invested in over the course of a year go up in flames.

“If you wear the shoes we won’t be your friend anymore.”

And I just had to wear the damn shoes.

*****

I am laying in savasana. It is hot in this yoga class.

It has been 7 days since my cat died. I need him to show me that in spite of my most honest expression that there is still someone out there who loves me, who doesn’t judge me, who won’t try to punish me with emotional distance, or force me to be different than who I am by withholding their love and affection.

He is not there.

Sweat pours down my forehead and mingles with tears and they fall down my cheeks.

“Why do I keep doing this to myself?”

And a ticker tape plays in my head of all the love I built, then lost in a dreadful moment of uncontrollable authenticity.

The shoes, the taunts, the passed note, the principals office, the front seat of my sister’s car, the cops, the family watches on while I fall apart, the words “a lot of immaturity” ring in my ears, the push-pull of hoping they would text and being relieved that they didn’t, that they won’t ever, that things are definitively over, no matter how much courage you mustered, no matter how authentic you were, no matter how hard you tried to be soft, approachable, knowledgeable.

It is finished. It is finished.

And a cat who forced me to look away while it happened all over again, to train my focus instead on our goodbye.

“You enter into relationships with unavailable and incompatible people and groups because you think earning their validation will prove all of those who abandoned you in the past wrong. You’ll finally be part of the joke, if you can just talk them into seeing you and appreciating you, even if you have to cut little bits of yourself off while you do it.”

Spirit whispers gently.

More tears mingle with the sweat. It is sweltering in here today.

My cat shows up in my mind again. The only way he can now. “I left when I did, because you know what to do now. You don’t need me anymore.”

The ticker tape shifts.

My husband wraps me in his arms; he is never not there. I send texts and get responses. People take the space they need for themselves, and before they leave they accommodate my need and tell me why. I say hard things to my friends who can handle my truthiest truth. I show up on my platform, and in my business saying audacious things that draw people into conversation that feels like forward momentum, not fracture. There is no shame around me anymore, no one humiliating anyone. I’ve built softness into my life and into the space I occupy. I’ve created my utopia, telling truth after truth after truth after beautiful freeing truth.

“Those who are left, belong.” Spirit whispers a mantra to take with me into the coming days.

A quiet sob escapes my lips.

*****

Waves wash upon a sandy shore. A boat owner with a Trump flag cracks open another beer. My children run past laughing wildly with their new friends.

I sit in a beach chair and run my fingers over words that may set me free if I have the courage to let them.

“Your perception is your reality.” “What is best for you is best for everyone else too.”

And I think again about abandonment. All those times people who I called my people failed to hold me, as I worked my steady route towards the truth of who I am. Oh how it stings. Every single time it has hurt, has taken me years to heal from, years to validate and forgive, a lifetime to fully alchemize the heartache.

I try a new perception on for size.

What if they left me for both our good? What if I just don’t have the perspective I need to see this as truth?

What if I begin interpreting their abandonment as an invitation into the choice to say goodbye? And what if I chose goodbye instead of clinging to someone’s ankles as they walked away?

Would it still hurt?

*****

The choice to say goodbye.

My home is calm. A lilting guitar melody plays in the background. It is only us, and the vet who is here to help.

My cat lays on my lap and drifts, drifts, drifts, into death. It is peaceful and quick.

The vet lifts his body off my lap and places it in a basket, and gently covers him in an afghan.

“I know it was not easy, but it was a brave choice you made. You loved him very much, and this choice only shows that.” She carried him out the door.

I am clutched by wracking sobs the moment the door shuts behind her.

Goodbye, even when it’s a choice, will hurt.