What I remember, from when I was gearing up to dismiss Jonathan, is how righteous I felt—how dismissiveness seemed like something I’d earned, in my approach. He and I had been friends for nearly a decade, at that point. Had I been asked to pen a dossier, I could break down his personality and behavior like an opposing coach. We had had good times, but also so-so and confusing times. And when he wronged me—rather, when I believed I had been wronged—all our shared history seemed to justify my decision to move on forever. I was ready for it, on some level. I had come very far from where we’d started out, and every ding and nick in our friendship now justified this grand cleavage, the commitment with which I told him I did not want to be his friend. Besides, there was nothing as serious as a mortgage or child tying us together; we’d just gone to Taco Bell, listened to the same bands, and lusted after the same people.
Jonathan was not the first close male friend with whom I’d stopped talking, at that point in my life. Those breakups had taken place in my teen years, when I was confident enough to keep it moving, and so it seemed possible that those friendships had only been experimental, like a goth phase or a new haircut. The dispute with Jonathan was something new. Less trivial, even as I recognized the cliche: two friends, at arms over a woman. The aftermath brought no bittersweet denouement, no unexpected reunion. We saw each other in public, but came no closer than cordial. About a year later, I wrote something for my spoonful of blog readers about what had happened, in the most allusive terms—no names, no identifying details. When word got back to him, this seemed to trigger some rageful response. Via back channels, Jonathan accused me of being dramatic (true) and slandering me to anyone who’d listen.
Now, we actually couldn’t be in the same room. I remember once steeling myself to attend a party where Jonathan would be, until a mutual friend, sensing I was the potentially reasonable one, insisted that I should just go home. Rather than lean into the inevitable scene, I did.
It would’ve been more fun—more satisfying, even—to embrace the turmoil, make a sport of it. Being potentially reasonable precluded the possibility, leaving everything in the realm of “could’ve been.” Instead, time went on, as time does, and slowly the beef began to smell undercooked. Sure, I’d felt wronged, and silly—but measured against the wrongness and silliness of the world, maybe I could simply get over it, and reconnect with my friend.
In this hyper-connected era, in which nostalgia is served up every time you check your phone, it’s always easy to imagine striking things up again—I email you, you fave my post, we inch our way towards correspondence (text, phone, bar) and all of a sudden it’s just like back in the day. Jonathan, ironically, was all the way off social media, but sometimes I’d see an old photo and think: Buddy, oh, buddy.
