A few months ago,
a while ago, more than half a year ago by now, my friend’s father passed away. It still breaks my heart to say that. There was nothing fair or okay about what happened, and I know her family will always be hurting, no matter how many times people tell them that he is “in a better place” or that “it will be better with time.” It still feels like a bad joke to me, an outside observer, so I can’t even imagine how surreal it is to the family.
I never cry. I envy the weepers. I wish it was that easy for me to release my grief or anger or frustration or sadness. I try to cry, think about sad things and scrunch up my face and probably give myself terrible wrinkles, but nothing happens. At the funeral and the wake, my friends were sobbing, and it wasn’t till the ride home, staring out the car window, no one watching me, that I could even let out a few tears.
My friend, the one who lost her father, doesn’t cry either. I mean, she cries, but only when she’s by herself. If she starts to cry in front of other people, she leaves the room. She hides her face, tries to stop, doesn’t want anyone to see her crying. And she was an unabashed weeper before all this, the one who cried when we watched any movie or read a touching news story. Now she is ashamed of her pain.
I hate seeing her like this. But the worst of it is, sometimes I just wish I had my friend back. The friend who was happy, who wasn’t grieving. I know how ridiculously selfish that sounds, and it isn’t like I’m not there for her. I’m there. I’m there whenever she needs me, to listen or bitch or drink or laugh. I’m there to spend the night and watch shitty movies, or vent about the friends who didn’t come for the funeral, or look at old photos from her childhood. I’m fucking there.
But it’s hard. How selfish am I? Hard as it is for me, it is a million times harder for her. But still, I just want everything to be back to normal. I wish I didn’t have to monitor everything I said in case a stray comment upset her, wish I could vent about something in my own life without feeling bad about how trivial my problems are compared to hers, wish that under her facade of “I’m fine” my friend wasn’t so empty and unhappy and alone.
It makes me so sad that her father, a man I came to know and respect and admire very much, is gone, and it makes me even sadder to know that my close friend will never, ever, be the same.
