I Never Liked Ghosts

Futility is a lesson best left to learn late in life when you’ve gained significant ballast to keep upright, or at least stand a fighting chance on life’s everchanging treacherous seas. Learn when to throw in the towel. Stop trying. Pack it in and give up, Caralina.

So sayeth, my most recent spiritual reading.

Sounds awful.

Feels ten times worse.

I swear the biped kingdom creates its unique brand dysfunction beverage, then removes 80% of the solute to make a more potent potion.

Not just strong. Overpowering.

Can’t simply be ouch. Gotta be excruciating.

No way around the harsh reality that "futility acceptance" is a foul-shit nastiness to learn. I personally detest it as a necessity, period. But more so now, the era we live in and all…

The Epoch of Emotional Dysregulation.

Over countless nights together, falling outside autumn, then winter, I let her in.

Mia.

Don’t think for one second she progressed to best friend status.

She didn’t.

Mia skipped steps.

Order and principles of mathematics never seemed to apply.

She was revelation.

My Sistah from another Mistah who I did not realize I craved, breathed in like oxygen. And she adored me. Trusted me. Gazed at me full face over months with no filters, and our closeness bore fruit sweet-ripe of healing. It felt way too good. Sometimes that’s your only sign.

This happened well over three decades ago. The first time…

Innocence ain’t just for children. Adults be innocent sometimes too.

Roy was my friend. My easy-going, supportive, helpful, platonic, MARRIED friend.

We’d help one another with mundane, inconsequential, infrequent tasks whilst volunteering for the same organization. Pick up a bag of apples on the way home from the grocery store. Deciphering gibberish from the T&C’s on the account contract. Transmission of files online.

Roy’s wife and I were friends, and over time, she’d often watch my preschooler until I got home from work.

Everything was great.

Until Roy ruined it. Harmless enough, I guess, but damned inconvenient when he started showing signs of 'LIKING me-liking me.'

Thought it my imagination, but no.

Blam.

Why do the least likely people get attracted to you and not the ones you want?

It showed up in ways that made me uncomfortable across a gulf of nothing that I could verbalize. He would tell me personal things his wife would say to him. He would stay a little too long at my house. Little things that I knew were not little things.

How can you make a person unlike you when you didn’t do anything to make them like you in the first place?

A huge arctic zone sprang up from my “jurisdiction.” I had no template, guidance, or guru to seek advice from on this one.

Then…

…Roy vanished without warning.

He still lived, worked, and drew breath in my neighborhood, and I’d see him in passing. Greet him and receive an unblinking, stare like, “Who the heck was I?”

Things finally clicked after weeks of this treatment, but it still stung awful, like I became the dead-undead walking, relying on others for validation that I existed at all. I’d never lost a friend before, let alone in the weird way this instance unfolded. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. What could I even say?

Scenario aspects occupied my thoughts for a considerable time. Resolution impossible. Just that feeling of being kicked in the gut, with the capacity to express the hurt of it taken away. I left it alone, considering it for the best, but it still bothered me that someone I considered a good friend could put me in a position like that, create a world where I ceased to exist, while it hurt like hell. Like a typical Cancerian, it gnawed at me for months as I wondered if there was something I coulda-shoulda done differently. Or maybe I'd get to the point where it didn’t bother me anymore. I’d been ghosted in real life before ghosting was a commonplace colloquialism.

Friendships have always been a big, fat, fricking deal for me. I didn’t have umpteen boyfriends growing up. I bought more stock in bona fide friendships. Besides, no one went out of their way to express romantic interest anyway. Not a big deal.

When a friendship ends, the ache goes deeper than any intimate partnership I’ve ever seen the end of. Maybe it’s only ‘anomaly-me’ that grows deep friendship roots, but that first loss with Roy gutted me and laid my viscera on the kitchen floor while I methodically packed a lunchbox for my preschooler.

What did I learn from all this?

Heck if I could verbalize that even now, but that lost and discarded feeling…never wanted to suffer that again. So, I was careful. Extra vigilant. Nobody could fall for me without my awareness—not again.

But life throws up myriad love variations that seep into other spaces we don’t even recognize we have.

Hey life, WTH?

Yeah. Mia.

A whirlwind of frolic and unwavering trust that entreats without being too pushy. Weeks turning into months, and she divulged her loneliest moments and her profound joys. Her lost wars and wounds with depression. Sexual abuse. Grief after parental loss. Existence. Triumph and resurrection. Our lives a slow intertwine of comfortable closeness that wasn’t restrictive.

Pulling the cover off dark experiences in my life led to a natural osmosis. Nothing forced. Nothing demanded. Organic. The type of friendship you understand is for life when two people have witnessed the worst and the lowest points mortals can sink below, yet still have love, support, and genuine care for one another.

But Mia travelled in on a tourist visa and had to return.

Home was halfway around the world.

I tried half-heartedly to throw up some distance for damage control, pending pain separation that I knew to be inevitable, and failed comprehensively.

Mia now occupied ‘the closest person I’ve ever known space in any relationship ever’ on earth. We confided things to each other and experienced things on cosmic levels that no other soul would ever know about.

With the help of social media, we stayed in touch regularly after geographical separation. She kept me abreast of everything going on in her life, from launching her own business to finding her own accommodation, and starting a new relationship. I’d get this nagging sensation about a pattern developing, where she’d only call when she wanted something. Then she got too busy to call at all.

I became like ‘the girl’ explaining to her how dejected that made me feel.

More than once.

It made no matter.

The result rolled out “Roy the Sequel.” Someone who simply stopped texting, calling, IM-ing with me completely. My emotion-filled conversations detailing concerns changed nothing. I didn’t want to give up on such a precious friendship that brought so much healing for both of us. But just like you can’t make somebody not like you, you can’t make them stay your friend either. This was an aspect of the futility lesson that I did not want to cover. It was a brutal final examination resit.

Final exams suck.

Ultimately, I got ghosted.

Again.

At least by this time, ghosting was an accepted definition.

So much for having the futility skillset down pat, though. My heart, mind, and spirit had other perspectives. Emotional Torture 101 prerequisites and higher-level merciless courses with no opt-out.

By comparison, the first-time ghosting episode seemed a breeze. But now, roots burrowed—fused to earth core depths of Sistah-gurrl-friendship. When ripped out, I sensed the dangerous place I’d inhabit. I held not clue #1 on how to address the agony that would ensue.

Clingy, I was not. The antithesis of needy. Yet my heart lay shredded mess on the kitchen floor once again, while externally I did goddamn stupid “normal” things. For the first time in forever, I grew genuinely concerned about myself. There would be no closure unless I created it, and I didn’t know how.

What happens when you let go of someone/something, but they/it won’t let you go?

Over the past decades since my previous friendship loss, what had I learned?

Had I progressed at all?

Could I be destined to live the rest of my life without love since I had no heart left? A thoroughly unappetizing thought…

I did the only thing I could do. I surrendered to a painful abyss and trusted Higher Powers that it was not to be my destiny.

My salvation was unorthodox. It would massively confuse in the explanation, involving successive episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, tears, tequila, and a lot of energetic internal screaming with self-conducted cardiac surgery of sorts (figuratively speaking.)

I learned that hearts regenerate. That people don't intend harm, but they do. That friendships are two-sided, and no matter what, repercussions are felt from both borders, whether discussed or not. That healing takes many forms, and one of the most adept healers looks at me in the mirror each day… Says:

Be gentle with yourself

Reverence yourself

Trust yourself. No…more than that. Meet and make more friends.

I promise you, I do.

Thank you for stopping by to have a read! It's absolute joy given to a writer to have this kind of attention.

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