on the subject of friends.
alright, i'm admittedly bad at keeping in touch with people, and even with people i'd consider to be my very good friends. it's not that i don't want to keep in touch or that i'm not interested in their lives and don't care at all, i do. i don't think i could even explain to myself why i'm so bad at something that seems like it should come so easily. am i too self-absorbed to get beyond the experiences of my own life to ask how other people are doing and how their lives are going? it's possible, i can be fairly self-absorbed. does that make me a bad friend? i don't know, maybe...but isn't it a two-way street? i also have trust and rejection issues; i don't trust that people won't reject me, not necessarily as a friend but as a person. ridiculous. that doesn't even make sense, does it?
anyway, the reason for the semi-incoherent rambling is that i've made some friends since coming here to colorado, some good, some i would just consider good acquaintances, and some that i'm pretty sure will always be there for me if i ever need them. there was one who i guess i would have termed my "best" friend here. i use quotations there because i'm not entirely sure what the term "best" really entails. what is a best friend? for the better part of a year she was the one i would have called or texted if something awesome or terrible or weird or anything happened to me. we work in the same lab and we'd joke around and talk all day and then i'd go home or to the gym and watch tv at night and if something on tv reminded me of something funny we'd talked about i'd have to text her and tell her. we would go out most weekends together and people could call one of us assuming the other was around, and it was almost always true. now, i've had friendships like this (for the most part) with people other than her, i'm just trying to explain the state of things as they were for basically a year.
i'm not sure what happened. maybe it was just the culmination of a couple different things, like when i get drunk i'm not as tolerant of people as when i'm sober. things don't roll off me the way they do normally, and if someone rubs me the wrong way i will confront it. i think people get used to me being quiet, taking things in stride and laughing it off. it seems like an exaggeration to say that i'm confrontational when intoxicated, though, because most people know me as a fairly easy-going happy touchy-feely person when i've had a few. she was just a person who insisted on being right, and could never be convinced that she was wrong even if it was something blatantly obvious; she could always talk her way around being wrong and make herself right in some way, and it was maddening. and if you insist on being right when i know the opposite to be true, it makes me angry and that builds up over time until i eventually burst. that could have been one of the things that resulted in this outcome. i'm not entirely sure what else could have helped at this point, but maybe i'll figure it out.
in any case, she as entirely stopped speaking to me, which i've felt has been coming for a couple months now. our conversations have dwindled and eventually stopped altogether. in the beginning i would start meaningless small talk about how her recent trips had gone or how her cats were doing. she would speak to me when convenient for her and give me short non-conversational answers when asked questions. she now only speaks around me and if i say something related to her conversations with others i'm not sure she acknowledges i even said anything. at first i was in denial and didn't think much of it because sometimes in lab we wouldn't talk much if we were busy, and then when she stopped returning my texts and went out of her way to not make eye contact or ask me to help her out with something i was forced to realize it was intentional. there was an angry stage where i was indignant, told myself i didn't care and she was a bitch. and now i believe i have entered the remorse stage, or something like that. i'm still angry, yet sad for the loss of my friendship, and that someone i though i could always count on could just walk away like that with no explanation. i got a call a couple weeks ago from a mutual friend and he assumed i was with her and wanted to know where we were so he could meet us because he couldn't get a hold of her on her phone, but was shocked to find out we no longer spoke. amazing. simply...preposterous. who does that? honestly.
i know i can't give the other side of the story, but i'm pretty sure i'm not the kind of person you just stop speaking to for some unimaginable slight, because if there was some terrible mistake and i was at fault you could tell me and i would apologize profusely for being so obtuse. i don't like to lose friends, it hurts. and i don't like to feel like i'm being manipulated, because i HAVE put some effort into trying to get over the not talking thing, but if she doesn't feel like it's ENOUGH and i have to put in more to win her back then i'm not going to play that game. so you think you're worth the extra effort? prove it.
what utter bullshit. sorry if my ramblings didn't make sense, i'm just trying to sort things out and get over them, because i think i'm done trying to resolve the issues.
thanks for listening.