Brey Willows

Card 40, Writing Down the Bones: “I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them.” Write for ten minutes.

I had four friends from my past, actually, and I’m only vaguely in touch with one of them. Actually, maybe it’s five. Five, if don’t count social media. I was forgetting the one who isn’t on my FB page because I only talk to her in actual conversation.

Friend one, the one I’ve known longest…she’s happy. She seems, happy, anyway. Kids, husband, crafty. Like her mum before her, completing a pattern of maternal contentment. She likes my posts, sometimes. The one time we met up after many, many years had gone by, she brought her teenager, who seemed a little baffled at why she was there as her mum lauded all her many accomplishments and regaled us with how happy she is. I don’t think we said much of anything, ourselves. Perhaps she already knew everything about us because of FB.

Friends two and three come in a non-contact container; one a divorced single mum with an intense job as a nurse, one a religious trad-wife who used to put a lot of god-botherer stuff on my socials. That’s about all I know about them.

Friend four was the one I got crazy with back in the day. We drove around the desert in her open top jeep, metal and rap too loud. Laughing lots. I lived with her briefly when I was at loose ends at seventeen. I moved. She moved. Said hi on FB occasionally. Then she reached out for money… and contacted my mum for money… and then I saw on FB she’d been found dead of a drug overdose in a desert hotel. Alone.

Friend five can hardly be called a friend if we don’t talk on social media, can she? If we have actual conversations on WhatsApp and check in with each other and talk about real things? Well, she’s the one I’m left with, anyway. The only other gay girl I knew in school, besides my closeted girlfriend. We went to our first Pride together. She called me after she got kicked out of the house when she came out. I was in another state by then. We met up with she and her wife in London last year. We’re both greyer, both a little wider around the hips. We’re both settled with amazing wives and looking at futures after 50.

A reason, a season, or a lifetime. Supposedly that’s how people come into your life. Lifetime friends are rare, like waking up with your hair still perfectly styled. It’s good to let the reason/season folks go when they’re no longer part of your path, instead of holding on to something no longer good for either of you. It’s a lesson I’m trying to learn; when to let go, and when to fight to keep something that still has breath in it. I’m learning.