Phantom Friendship
Complexities of seeing someone you used to know
It was bound to happen. This sense of strange, phantom friendship. That feeling of something that once was there, sure, deep, and strong, you felt. And then out of nowhere was gone with neither permission nor time for consideration.
It’s been four months and a week since I called a friend who, it turns out, wasn’t mine any longer. Four months and a week since the beautiful beginnings of a feminine friendship I thought would last and grow died an ignoble death on the phone, before my ears could process. Before I fully understood what had come to pass. Before I found my stomach drop and understood that that niggling sense of doom I’d convinced myself wasn’t playing danger music in the background wasn’t just a figment of an overly worried inner child.
It’s been three weeks longer since I’ve even seen or felt this physical presence. Of this, now, phantom friendship.
And it’s strange, when something that once was there feels still alive, yet dead. And not truly of your own making, either. And then it happens that you encounter, as if by chance, an achingly, numb non-interaction.
What do you do? I was cut off, and yet that doesn’t mean my caring stops. I was removed and yet I remain. I was pushed away and yet I cannot keep from feeling that it wasn’t something I consented to. And yet I must accept. That this love has no place, no space. And what do you do? When they arrive again in your life by chance. The seeming barest physical distance separates and yet, and yet, an endless chasm has appeared. That phantom friendship that leaves one shaking, nervous system burning through a sense of paralysis taking over every sense.
I was cut out, cut off, abandoned. And yet life moves ever forward. Somehow. I feel some of the drama of four months past rearing.
And the beauty of what’s happened in four months and one week is this. I was cut off, cut out, abandoned by one friend. And I’ve made newer, truer friends since. Something that my inner child thought impossible once upon a time.
And I still care about the phantom friend, despite our stranger status filled with confusing phantom friendship thoughts. I cannot be any other way when I still don’t understand what happened and in spite of all the hurt and loss.
-R
PS. Below is an old art piece (Avatar of Ikoth) and something that is related to my current creative writing project. Which, in a way, is what led to seeing the phantom friend. I was meeting a bestie for a creative co work session. We are both helping each other with creative accountability. After the hit to my nervous system I wasn’t in a state to create, and I still had room to hold space for my friends ideas. It was rich and deeply wonderful, and healing. Funny how life is like that sometimes.
