Renee is the sweetest person - she’s 100% USDA certified organic cane sugar sweet. She looks like a girl in an Urban Outfitters catalog, too. Neither of these reasons is exactly why we no longer talk. In fact, I don’t really know exactly why, except that we haven’t in so long that to do so again would be out of the ordinary. There’d be too much catching up to do, and someone would have to explain the lapse.
I met Renee at this Harlem charter school where I used to work. We were both new teachers at the school with only one year of experience under our belts. In the early days of classroom arrangement and teacher orientation, it seemed like we’d be great friends. We liked the same music and shared the same views. The only difference was that Renee was hip in that easy, Cat Power-listening, “I feel so much more centered when I’m vegan,” lush long-haired kind of way. Meanwhile, I had stringy bobbed hair and a hankering for Taco Bell.
We worked together for a year, drifting closer or farther in the tide of chaos, field trips, and paperwork. When she broke up with her live-in boyfriend, I was the first person she called. I was in my own floundering relationship at the time. We’d bonded before about guys - how funny and difficult they are, how we worried about our tendency to give them such central places in our lives. I hoped the experience meant we’d be closer friends, but everything pretty much remained the same.
Post-breakup Renee was different, though. She said she wanted to go back to school to become a dance therapist. She started dating a hipster with sexual dysfunction. Every conversation was predicated on the fact that her life and goals were nebulous and unfulfilled. Though unintended, the message I took from them was: I am tragically hipper than thou.
I quit teaching after that year, desperate to use my brain more than my vocal cords. Renee got a job at a school in her Lower East Side neighborhood. I broke up with my boyfriend after vacillating about it for months. Renee and I talked at least once a week. When we hung out, though, I was always distinctly aware that she was on a schedule and had plans following whatever we did. Some guy friend who had an awkward crush on her had asked her to a movie. Her sister was coming in for a concert. I felt like I was a pitstop on the way to a much cooler destination.
The last time we were supposed to hang out, there was a sudden torrential downpour. I didn’t feel like schlepping around in galoshes, but before I could cancel, Renee bailed on me. She said her sister was in town and that they were going to hang out instead. This might be understandable if her sister was unexpectedly visiting from far away. But she lived in New Jersey and visited a few times a month! Why not also invite me, since we already had plans? This wasn’t the first time she’d done something like this, but it was the last.
Renee’s voicemail said we should make plans for another time. I never called her back, and she didn’t call me back either. She was the Lower East Side; I was the Upper West. Perhaps we both knew it.
I had a roommate exactly like Renee. Although my “Renee” would remind me that she made more money then me, and would question every decision I made. Once she moved out then she would ONLY call me when something was going on with her. She called me two years later to tell me she met a guy and then proceeded to ask me why I was still single. Then a year later, she called to tell me she had gotten engaged, but then didn’t invite me to the wedding. She then called me a year later to tell me she got pregnant. If I wasn’t home she would leave messages on my phone. I never called her back and I never called to tell her anything going on with me. When my father died last October, she sent a very nice card. I didn’t respond back because I felt that she wasn’t the type of friend I wanted to discuss my father’s death with.
I always felt, much like you, that I was just not “cool enough” for her.
There is an African proverb about friends of the heart and friends of the road. Friends of the road stay for whatever amount of time is needed to fulfill that moment or need. They come for awhile, but then they leave us. Friends of the heart stay forever, whether they are near us or not. They are always there and we can always count on them.” Sounds like Renee was a friend of the road.
Nancy, thanks for your long, thoughtful comment. I’ve worried sometimes that maybe I was too hard on Renee, especially because she never overtly hurt my feelings. (Your friend, on the other hand, was obviously out of line, and you were a saint to put up with her as long as you did). Renee and I really seemed to have so much in common at first, but that’s how things go. A lot of people will ultimately be phase friends or friends of the road, and sometimes it’s hard to figure that out until they’re gone.
When you are young all you have are firends and family, so it is easy to be friends even if you only see them rarely when you do you just pick up where you left off. You are in the same place in life it is easy to relate and be involved without much effort and you have more then enough time to put in that effort. Adult friendships are such that you can’t take them for granted if you don’t nurture them, they tend to go away. Life just takes over and the smallest thing can send you down a path completely different from them and vice verse, removing the foundation that your friendship was built upon. Quickly a friend, especially one that was just a work friend and not one rooted in your past, will turn into an acquaintance and then someone you used to work with. If you nurture them however, you can reset the foundation change what the friendship is about. sounds like here neither of you nurtured this friendship so when your circumstances that brought you together changed it drifted away. The friend of the road and friend of the heart metaphor is nice and all but it seems to absolve your own participation in it. It blames or honors the friend as you passively receive whichever they choose to or end up being. Friendship is like any relationship it takes some work and has less to do with what kind of friend they are and more to do with what that friendship is built out of.