Goodbye, C.

“CG.”

Her initials are tattooed on the left side of my back and sometimes, inexplicably, the tattoo raises like a welt and I can trace her script with my pointer finger. We got these tattoos two months before we graduated from college—a journey we shared together right from the start. You see, we were randomly paired up as roommates in 2011, our freshman year. Throughout those four years, we were known across campus for our immovable friendship. We were attached at the hip—we sobbed together when things got hard, we drunkenly danced at house parties we weren’t invited to, and we played hilarious pranks on each other that drove the rest of our dorm absolutely crazy. She was my person and the existence of one another had us believing in soulmates.

These tattoos are six years old now, and besides pictures, this permanent marking is the only thing I have to remember the time I had with her.

In February of 2018, I received a message from her on Facebook (for the purposes of this article, we’ll call her ‘Chloe’). Chloe declared she did not “have the grace to proceed with our friendship.” She also mentioned that this farewell, “wasn’t forever.” She ended it by saying she loved me and wished me the best.

And that was over two years ago.

Right after she sent me that message, a message I’ve read probably 100+ times, she deleted me as a friend on Facebook and blocked me on Instagram. I haven’t heard a word from her since. To respect her, I have not reached out or attempted to contact her.

Now, I’ve been broken up with before, but never by a friend. My best friend.

This hit on a level I still struggle to comprehend and share—let’s just say, I drank myself to sleep and cried in my boyfriend’s lap for a solid month after this. Maybe two.

I remember, in between my snotty, blubbering sobs, asking my boyfriend, “Why don’t they have advice for friendship break-ups? Why don’t they talk about it? They’re so much harder than regular ones.”

Of course by “they” I meant ‘the internet,’ but looking back on it, I actually mean why don’t we, as women, talk about lost friendships?

Because that was the worst part of this! I couldn’t find anyone who felt the way I did. I didn’t know anyone who’d been practically ghosted by their best friend. Romantic partner? Sure. I knew that happened. But this was different. This hollow goodbye had me questioning who I was––I mean, not only did I lose Chloe, but I lost the person I thought I was. I questioned everything about myself and hesitated to look in the mirror. How could I have been so blind? What was wrong with me? Was it something I said or did? Was it something I didn’t do?

And...that was the second-worst part: Not knowing. It drove me crazy and it made me sick—how was I supposed to fix this if I didn’t know what I did?

After picking myself up and managing to return to daily life without crying at the drop of a hat, the immense sadness I felt turned into a heavy, painful weight that impaired my ability to forgive and love those around me, as well as myself.

And boy, oh boy did I hold on tightly to this weight. I carried it around with me like it was my job. I carried it into new friendships, therapist offices, business meetings, and date nights with my boyfriend. I could feel my “immense sadness weight” morphing into rage and self-loathing, and those around me knew it was becoming dangerous. I was blaming myself so much for the end of our relationship that I started to believe that I didn’t deserve anything good happening to me.

By mid-2019, I decided I needed to “get over it.” I needed to forgive her, myself, and all the seemingly inevitable circumstances that caused our friendship to end. But how was I supposed to move on and get over it without an apology, an explanation—something tangible that would somehow illustrate exactly where things went wrong?

Closure. That’s what I thought I needed to fully heal from the breakup. I daydreamed about receiving a phone call one day from an unknown number and when I’d answer, Chloe would be on the other end and she’d finally tell me what happened…what I did. I imagined running into her at a coffee shop and getting a chance to ask, point-blank, where we went wrong.

I waited for that to happen.

And, of course, it never did. So what did I do instead? Well…I’d love to say that one day I woke up and felt completely “over it,” but time wasn’t really helping at this point and I knew I couldn’t count on it doing me any favors.

But, as with everything in life, hitting rock bottom brought me the clarity I needed to safely shut the door on this painful breakup.

March of 2020, at the exact moment in which the entire country shut down for COVID-19, I became one of the millions of Americans who lost their job. Like many, I pretty much panicked for a solid month before I escaped to the great outdoors and spent most of my days pacing around city parks while attempting to answer life’s greatest questions.

And that’s when it started to make sense. The loathing, the confusion, the anxiety––I wasn’t prepared for this. I don’t mean emotionally, I mean, I wasn’t prepared for this because society had taught me that the only kind of heartbreak that matters is the romantic kind.

I’d grown up on movies and books and television series where the protagonist's greatest heartbreak was losing a romantic partner via death or, most commonly, a breakup. No one had taught me how to mourn the loss of a best friend––a woman who came into my life and changed it for the better. No one taught me how to accept being abandoned by someone I’d shared the last seven years of my life with, someone who knew everything about me and continued to love me regardless.

For the past two and a half years, I’d felt unjustified in my mourning. Female friendships are never portrayed as being stronger than the greatest romantic love you’ll ever have, and that’s just one glaring example of how we let women down. Female friendships are some of the most cathartic, earthshaking relationships you’ll ever have, and (spoiler!), they stick with you, for better or for worse. Even now, I crave the ‘best friend reunions’ in the movies––you know the ones. The two gal pals apologize, laugh off their misunderstandings, pull each other into a tight best friend hug, and walk off into the sunset with their arms around each other.

But it’s not always like that. So let me get to the final point here:

You have to accept the explanation you never got.

You have to move on knowing there might not be an apology in sight and you have to be okay with that. Even as I type this, I can feel my heart aching for the friendship that once was. It’s been gone for some time now and I know now that (and I’m sorry to break it to ya) I’ll never be “over it.”

You’ll never be “over” something that changed your life and you can’t ask yourself to. “Closure” doesn’t exist when someone meant so much to you that you tattooed each other's name on your body.

People come and go, and painfully enough, best friends are no different. Hold them close while they're here, cry if they go, but never doubt that you’re alone through any of it. Best friend breakups happen, and honestly, it’s time we talked about them.