Posted at 9:00 a.m.
It’s 10:50 a.m. Friday, July 22. I respond to glowing messages about my role in the film Vanishing lines. I can’t smile reading them. I am grateful, but sad.
People love the scene where I explode and cry talking to my friends.
I dive back into the emotions that I had to seek out to make my acting believable. Painful emotions, which are not healed. I think of the sleepless nights I had after a friend texted me to tell me it was over, the two of us. To the long paragraphs that explained this abrupt break. That I never saw coming.
My friendship mirror is broken. I don’t see the blind spots. I get hit and it hurts.
Friendship breakups, my amicable breakups, happened in surprise. One morning, I open my phone, I read my friend’s name, I smile, I read her message, I cry. The carousel of guilt can last for weeks. Months. A life.
I am not a bad person or a bad friend. I don’t know who I am anymore when I read the reasons why the relationship we built is ending. crumbles. Is breaking. Inside, I’m breaking down like a leaf waiting for the next season. The time is long.
I don’t know how to play a role. I live what I buried most painful in me. I remember the times when the phrases: “Apparently, you’re talking behind my back”, “I’m ending our friendship”, “You’re trying to manipulate my emotions” have surfaced in recent years. All the times I tried to replicate, to understand. And all the times the door was closed, locked, the key thrown away and the lock changed.
The time I waited, respected, thought and hoped, to finally realize that the other person was gone, never to return. I’m hitchhiking on a road where no one will pass. I will have to walk for a long time.
What hurts in friendship is not the breakup. It is the silence that is left in suspense. The hope that it will come back, in the void. The inability to convince someone that everything she has heard is wrong.
What hurts when you’re an adult is that the doors close harder, faster and there is almost no chance of looking through the crack.
As a child, the doors had no locks. You could come in, go out, slam the door, but the opening was always present.
As an adult, we close the door making sure that it is locked three times. The fear that someone might come in.
Recently, I made a new friend. I didn’t think that as an adult it was possible. Since we are almost completely developed and sealed off from new attachments, letting in someone who is at the same stage of metamorphosis as us is impossible.
Especially when the wounds of past relationships resurface every time it feels like we’re bonding. That we are charmed. Let’s let go.
We don’t lose friends over time, we let them go to other horizons because the trajectory is no longer the same. Conversations are less and less fluid and, once at home, lying in bed, when we think back to the times spent with them, we don’t have the mischievous little smile that reminds us of the beautiful moments of that past moment.
I made a new friend.
I was scared at first. I wondered if the house of cards that was being built over our stories was solid or if the gust of wind I feared was going to screw it up.
But now I know I have a new friend. And that it’s true.
She gave me the keys to her house and told me to close the door quietly behind me.