#8: The Many Ways Grief Shows Up

The less often discussed types of grief, dragons, excellent canned chickpeas, and my best geriatric recommendation yet.

I walked out of the rec room of a fraternity house, dressed like Posh Spice. It was yet another typical balmy, sticky summer evening in Providence, Rhode Island, the only state smaller than the one I had arrived there from (Delaware). Enrolled in a 7-week summer college program at Brown, I was a freshly-retired figure skater at the ripe age of 16. It was my first “normal person” experience amongst peers that didn’t grow up in an ice rink, like I had for the last near-decade.

Next to me, was a girl dressed like Ginger Spice. It was one of the last costume parties we had in our home for the summer; a makeshift dorm that was really a fraternity house, with no AC, but plenty of acrid beer and other less unidentifiable (we preferred it stay that way) smells to offer. This girl, fake Ginger Spice, turned into my first best friend I had made for myself out in the real world. We were in the height of our formative years, and quickly bonded over our aspirations of getting into a top college, our crushes on high school boys we’d later cackle at, our blossoming interest in politics, and less tangible things like the strange experiences of being, in Britney’s words, not a girl, not yet a woman.

2007 teenagers didn’t have unlimited texts or the existence of social media, so we wrote each other letters every week, using our identical 4-color pack of pens we both had, colorfully updating each other with the latest drama in our lives, after returning to our respective coasts. My belief that we were going to be lifelong best friends was only fortified by the fact that we both chose colleges that were only a 3.5 hour train ride away from each other. As our collegiate years passed, we visited each other multiple times. But, naturally, we expanded our individual social lives and circles in our new cities, leaving our correspondence to wane, but the significance of our friendship never changed, at least for me. Following graduation and the chapter of our inaugural big-girl jobs, she moved to NYC for work. I was thrilled, thinking we’d see each other more frequently.

Then, that weird, awkward friendship limbo stage that everyone knows, but hates began. I reached out a lot, with little return. I started feeling rejected, then started gaslighting myself into wondering if I was being too sensitive. I couldn’t discern whether her reasons for skirting meeting up were honest, to be taken at face value, or if she was trying to politely blow me off and hoping I’d get the hint I wasn’t getting. I racked my brain, thinking of what I could have possibly done to hurt her or make her less inclined to continue our friendship on. I chalked it up to her going through her own personal stuff, so I gave her space, hoping she’d reach out when she was ready. She did once. We met up, everything felt great and normal, then things returned right back to the way it was: murky and an echo of what used to be.