The Y2K Diary
After reading the article I shared in last week’s newsletter It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart, I kept thinking about it sporadically while I was trying to work. I had left it open in a separate tab and went back to reread lines that really hit home as I procrastinated with my other favorite past-time: ruminating. I thought about the inevitable cycle of friendships and all the ways they seemingly end but never leave you the way you found them. The different types of friendships we have throughout the phases of our life make up parts of our personality, if only temporarily, as we continue to seasonally change.
Some friendships end tumultuously, dramatically, with a side of betrayal, and are later depicted in an episode of Euphoria. Like romantic break-ups, the feelings you cycle through are often disbelief, pain, anger, sadness, madness, numbness. You talk about it to all of your other friends relentlessly, trying to feel out if they’re still on your side or not. It’s ugly, hurtful, and – unlike that awful ex – you most likely won’t take them back. These friendships break your heart because, while they may have happened for a reason, it’s sometimes hard to accept why or how. Maybe the cracks in the foundation were crumbling long before you noticed the walls were uneven and the fact that you didn’t know makes you so completely out of touch. How could you not see this coming? The silver lining here is that these friendships always had an expiration date and knowing the truth about someone is better than loving a lie.
The decaf friendships are often work-related. I call them decaf because you’re no longer drinking coffee because you need the caffeine to function, but because you like the routine and the way it tastes. You love seeing these people every day, you unlock a certain part of your personality that allows you to adhere to different types of humor, you go to work events with a buddy. These friendships are essential to survive in the working world. At every job I ever worked, I have thrived upon these bonds. Taking coffee breaks, walking to the train together, learning about their life in small in-between moments, crying in the bathroom when your boss is a dick or you didn’t get a raise. Then you quit, or they got another job, or you both get laid off. What happens immediately after one of these things determines if the friendship is going to make it to the next level or not. There’s no bad blood simmering behind the scenes, it just sort of amicably ends. I would say my success rate is 50/50 – these people have either become my best friends or a friendly acquaintance I watch fly by on an Instagram story.
But what really got me thinking about all of this was the key adolescent friend – the ever-present sidekick to one’s main character – who slowly fades out of view. It’s difficult to pinpoint a day when it happened exactly, it was just time going by, too many basic life factors that stopped aligning. It’s heartbreaking because it’s the friendship you declared would last forever and ever. That’s what the necklaces said anyway: best friends forever.
I met Whitney when I moved to Advance, North Carolina in late summer when we started 5th grade. She lived right down the street from me in a neighborhood called Oak Valley, an idyllic backdrop for our sun-soaked days. It was the type of familial neighborhood where everyone was relatively the same age. Our parents were all the same age, teenagers had other teenagers, and I had Whitney. Between 5th grade and the summer before our sophomore year, we were completely inseparable. We carpooled to school dances and football games, cheer practice, the mall, movies, and showed up to every event as conjoined twins even dressing similarly in complementary colors. I spent a week each summer at her grandparents’ house in the mountains with her sister and cousin like another member of the family. We would swing by the Wal-Mart on the way up to get sparkly eyeshadow and a couple of CDs to listen to simultaneously in our headphones. I realize now that these summers were where all of our growth spurts took place and we would plan to return to school more mature and cool. It was during this time we learned about sex because we stayed up late sneakily watching Talk Sex with Sue Johanson giggling and eating brownies.
I, like many other youths of the early 2000s, felt a flood of nostalgia when watching Pen15. So many moments mirrored my own experiences with Whitney – the thong and school play episodes especially – and it felt so nice to relive some of these cringe moments since I don’t really talk to anyone anymore from that time. The awkward middle school years are such a tender time where we start to morph into new versions of ourselves based on the environments we’re in and the people we spend all that time with. Between puberty and crushes, there’s chaotic energy coursing through our veins that makes us want to grow up faster and slow it all down simultaneously. I remember feeling so acutely aware of what everyone was doing, who they were talking to, where they got their clothes, what their parents allowed them to do, and ensuring my development was on the same track as everyone else. Having a best friend to navigate all the uncharted territory was the only way through all the firsts and I felt so lucky that I had someone to hold my hand.
Around freshman year, every single one of my friends had a LiveJournal (early social media blogging if you don’t recall) that they unabashedly updated with extreme detail, and we all read one another’s like the morning paper. A few months ago, Whitney texted me out of the blue saying she had found her old LiveJournal and sent me a screenshot of an excerpt. It was the day I moved away. I felt my heart crinkle up in my chest as I read the words in her voice. I had a dramatic flashback of my family driving out of Oak Valley that day and past Whitney’s house where she waved goodbye with tears in her eyes from the driveway. It was the hardest move of my young life. I felt like I was still in the incubator, not ready to hatch again and be out on my own, especially in high school. It seemed like I was just starting to figure things out and had the stable foundation of a life with friends who gave me a sense of identity.
I was unable to find my personal LiveJournal, but Whitney’s archive was still fully intact. I found myself pouring over each heavily detailed entry, accessing old memories long forgotten and little idiosyncrasies about our younger selves that made me laugh and cry. Our lives were chatting on AIM and meeting up with all of our friends at the pool, birthday parties at the park, co-ed lock-ins at the YMCA, our high school schedules, late nights at Waffle House like it was an exclusive dive bar that only we knew about it. It was nothing and everything at the same time.
It’s harder to make friends as you get older, and even the idea of it can be overwhelming. Telling new people about all the quirks and traumas that make up your history seems like it can be too much to unpack, especially if you don’t know how long someone is gonna stick around. We’re less open than when we were kids because we know that there’s something to lose. And with people moving frequently for new jobs or marriage/kids, the lack of close proximity often reveals itself as the nail in the coffin of a friendship. I’ve always envied people who grew up in the same place and share every milestone of their lives together because it’s a consistency I’ve never had and maybe makes it easier to keep it going out of habit. But like Jennifer Senior’s article reminds us, we need friendships more than ever as we get older – we just have to try harder to keep them.
While Whitney and I kept in touch throughout high school with visits in between, it really slowed during college, when we were changing all over again. However, I never really felt like the friendship ended and don’t to this day. While the long periods of time do painstakingly pass and it can feel strange to reach out when you haven’t spoken in so long or know what the day-to-day life of someone else is anymore, the love can still live there in a holy time capsule. Digging it up can be a sore spot, but remembering those shiny parts of yourself in that friendship is worth revisiting and it’s comforting to know that it’s still there. Whitney ended up marrying her next-door neighbor and I was invited to the wedding. I went and was welcomed with open arms by her whole family and it was almost like all those years hadn’t passed and I was the same girl who lived down the street in Oak Valley, if only for a day.
Instead of a happy highlight reel for a not-so-happy week, I’m including a readable version of the LiveJournal post in hopes that you can maybe see a younger version of you in there.
Tonight was Kim’s going way party...there was a lot of people there…it still hasn’t hit me that Kim’s leaving…I mean, we’re best friends and everyone knows that and we’re always together and it just hasn’t hit me that it’s going to end…well WE’RE not going to end but all the time we spend together will…::sigh:: Kim’s like, the only person who is so much like me and with her I can just be stupid and crazy and I know she will be the same way with me…she’s probably one of the only people who will take a walk with me and name bushes and bugs and build little bug motels out of cinderblocks in the road…I can call her anytime I want and I can just go to her house whenever since I can walk to it cuz it’s right down the street…like when I get in an argument with someone in my house I can just go over there…I’m always used to carpooling EVERYWHERE with her since she’s just right there and now all that’s going to change…I’m just going to have to make a lot of adjustments this year…me and her are just so close and it’s gonna be hard without her @ school and without calling her every morning to talk to each other about what to wear for school and everything…and to get in stupid rights with about not wearing tights haha! Gah. I love her and I’m going to miss her! I’m so glad she’s my best friend because I don’t know how I could have gotten through these past 6 years we’ve been best friends without our laughs and her great advice.
Thanks for reading.