Conversations With Ghosts
Do you ever imagine what it would be like to finally meet up with the friend that ghosted you?
It’s only when I’ve finally found the place, parked the car in the small rear car park and turned off the engine, that I notice how fast my heart is beating. How rapid and shallow my breathing is. How my whole body is deeply trembling from its core.
I sit back in my seat and — after taking some long deep breaths — I notice the shaking spread outward along my thighs and arms, until eventually there’s a softer looser feeling in my belly as it slowly begins to subside.
“I’m really scared,” I tell myself, and the small, tense pressure in my chest is like an answering nod.
Another thought pops into my head then, and this one is like a child blurting out a panicked warning:
“I don’t want to do this. This is a really really bad idea. I should leave right now.”
It’s a familiar voice, and one that I spent years listening to with a story that it was my ‘gut instinct’ protecting me. Today though, I take another deep breath and answer that panicked scared little-child-voice as kindly and calmly as I know how,
“I hear you, and I want to do this. I want to know what really happened and to stop imagining. And I don’t want to be scared and sad about this any more.”
I’m here today to meet up with B, a woman I’d once called my best friend, for the first time in almost twenty years. We met at Uni when we were both in our 20s, and formed an immediate bond that solidified into an intense, close friendship when we moved in together. For five years, we spoke almost daily, went on holidays together, supported each other through heartbreak and shared all our darkest secrets, all without one angry word or misunderstanding between us.
After our degree course finished, we’d call each other every other day — this was pre-internet — and talk on the phone for hours about our lives, and about her upcoming wedding (to T, one of my other close friends). Alongside that, we also exchanged many long hand-written letters about all the things that were important to us, which gradually expanded into parcels containing little gifts or books we thought the other would enjoy.
It was as a result of one of these many joyful letter-parcels that, what I by then considered to be an unshakeable friendship, came to an unexpected and painful end. My friend was away from home, staying for a short while with her grandmother in a small village, and when I posted my latest parcel to her — a 3-pager full of the usual expletive filled nonsense we sent each other, and a particularly hilarious example of some softcore porn I’d found in a local bookshop — I accidentally wrote the wrong house number on the parcel.
Instead of being delivered to her house, the book and letter went to her grandmother’s elderly next-door neighbours who, ignoring the name on the outside, opened it and were apparently completely scandalised by the contents.
To my great surprise, my friend was terribly upset by this. Baffled by her anger at a simple mistake, I apologised, even offered to call the neighbours and explain what had happened, but from that moment on her attitude towards me changed.
She stopped calling and responding to my letters and then — the following month — announced that she’d decided that her sister and oldest childhood friend were to be her only two bridesmaids. I was a little hurt to not be included in the wedding party, especially as her husband-to-be was also a close friend from Uni, but I reasoned that maybe she’d been under pressure from her family to keep the whole thing relatively small. The next month however — when I drove 250 miles north for their wedding — it became obvious that her not including me was an indication of something far more serious and — after that day — I never heard from either her or her husband T again.
In the weeks and months afterwards, I tried many times to contact her, before eventually settling into a kind of bewildered heartbroken mess about it. If I saw people in the street that looked like her I’d feel tearful and frightened. If a song came on the radio that reminded me of her, I’d slide into a deep funk for the rest of the day. The ‘not-understanding’ ate away at me like a cancer, and — as if rushing into a void that had been created by her subtraction — every awful painful feeling I’d ever had about rejection, loss and loneliness filled me up.
Many years had passed since then, and although those awful feelings had eventually passed, I still found myself startled by a stab of something like grief whenever her name was mentioned. So it was with some shock — and no small amount of trepidation — that I had opened the email that she’d sent to my work email address a few weeks ago, the subject header of which was:
“Hi Law! Long time no speak!”
There was nothing much of note in the message itself, a friendly greeting, a summary of what she and her husband T had been up to for the last 18 years, a couple of pictures of them and their two teenage kids attached. I read and reread the whole thing several times in a kind of stunned, dissociative state, and when my husband got home that evening I read it to him too.
“What the fuck?” he said mildly, and shook his head, “Why is she emailing you now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Why does she say she ‘doesn’t know why you lost touch’? Doesn’t she remember completely ghosting you?”
“I don’t…know.”
“Maybe she’s hoping you’ve forgotten.”
“Maybe.”
He looks at me in silence for a moment, curious, a little concerned.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Again. I have no fucking idea.”
Now, just under four weeks after receiving that email, I enter the front door of the bar we’ve agreed to meet at and — feeling like my heart has suddenly grown three times larger in my chest — I scan the faces of every person in the room.
And there she is. Sat gazing out the window with a slight frown on her face, but looking almost exactly as she did the last time I laid eyes on her, despite being almost twenty years older. She has the same hair-style, the same kind of clothes, the same slim angular build, even her face looks like she hasn’t aged a year.
Tucking my bag under my arm I slowly approach her table, and at the very last minute she turns, and smiles the biggest widest sunniest smile you can imagine.
“OH MY GOD!!!” she says with seemingly authentic delight, and leaps to her feet to envelope me in a huge bear hug.
It’s not a total surprise, but even so I can’t seem to stop myself from loosely returning it, despite feeling anything but affectionate right now. She steps back, still holding my hands, but almost as soon as she sees my expression, her smile fades.
“What is it?” she says, and apparently that’s all I need to open the floodgates.
I ask her to sit down, and then I sit down opposite her and look at her. And I start with the very first thought that comes into my head.
“I am so confused,” I say, and I search her face for some kind of clue.
She frowns,
“What do you mean? What about?”
I feel a sudden little prickle of heat on my throat.
“I don’t understand why you contacted me after all this time. And why you hugged me just then like we’re still friends.”
My face is hot now, and I imagine flushed. I take a deep breath, and continue.
“I was so hurt and sad when you just stopped talking to me. I had no idea why you were so angry with me over that mix up with the parcel, and you never told me. You were my best friend. I loved you and I trusted you more than anyone else. And you just dumped me.”
She’s stopped smiling, and I imagine her eyes look a little wary. I can’t help thinking that she’s probably regretting sending that email now.
I think about saying something to make her feel better, reassure her that I’m ok, everything’s ok, but then that kind, nurturing inner voice I’ve been cultivating for the last decade tells me:
“It’s not your job to make other people ok, remember?”
Eventually, after what seems like a full minute of silence, she looks up at me and starts talking.
“I didn’t tell you any of this at the time, but when all that happened I was…kind of having a breakdown. My dad had had a heart attack. They took him into hospital and we thought he was going to die…”
“Yes, I remember all that. But he was ok, wasn’t he?”
“He was. But I wasn’t. I think I’d always thought of him as my rock. My mum had been ill on and off my whole life, and my sister, but dad…he was the one I could rely on. The one I knew would always be there no matter what. And then suddenly, I saw that he wasn’t.”
She sighs, and I watch her pale fingers as she pulls at the fabric of her skirt.
“When that thing happened with the letter, I was angry with you. I felt so humiliated when gran’s neighbours came round. She made me apologise to them, and I remember feeling like a little kid, just so embarrassed and uncomfortable. Then when you laughed about it, I think I just snapped.”
“I laughed about it?” I frown, “I don’t remember that bit.”
“Yeah, maybe you’d thought that I’d think it was funny — two old dears opening a parcel full of porn — and I really didn’t,” her lips quirk upwards in a wry smile, “I mean, it’s really funny now, when I think about it. But at the time…I just felt like you didn’t understand anything.”
“I didn’t,” I say, “All I knew was that one day it was ok to make jokes like that, and the next day it wasn’t.”
“Yeah,” she nods slowly, “When you say it like it, it must have been confusing. For me it was a long slow build up of months of feeling alone and scared and angry, and not knowing how to talk about it or tell anyone. I think maybe you just got the brunt of it. Because I couldn’t be angry at T.”
She lifts her head up and looks me in the eyes, and I suddenly remember a whole load of stuff about how it was back then.
I remember how she had agonised over marrying T, had even told me several time before the wedding that she thought it was ‘a huge mistake’, but that she was terrified of breaking the heart of this sensitive, kind man. Of disappointing her parents who were so invested in her relationship with him and the idea of grandkids, scared of changing her mind, of wrecking things with T and then regretting it afterwards.
I remember all that stuff, and then I remember how much I’d loved this woman, how she’d felt like my sister, like a missing part of me and how much it had hurt to lose that.
“I missed you so much,” I say, and I feel my throat clamp up, tears forming in my eyes. “It felt like my heart was broken. It was so painful that you would just drop me like that. After everything we’d been through together.”
She looks agonised now, anxious, uncomfortable. I imagine this is not what she’d been expecting at all. I imagine she’d expected me to come here and have a pint with her and say ‘water under the bridge’, perhaps be a little passive aggressive, but not this.
Not this middle-aged woman, openly crying in a pub in the middle of the day.
“I’m really sorry,” she says, softly, “I didn’t think about how confusing it must have been. And later on, I think I was just shut off the idea of us being friends again. Maybe you seemed too much like a part of my ‘before life’.
And then other week, when I emailed you, it was because T and I had been looking through some old pictures. The ones of that holiday we had together? And I suddenly remembered again what a…great friend you’d been to me.”
She seems about to reach for my hand, but then thinks better of it.
“I am sorry though. I think I just forgot what happened. Or I didn’t think you’d still be hurt. ”
I look at her face then, and try to notice all my sensations. I ask myself ‘am I angry?’ and notice the feelings in my chest and stomach. And it doesn’t feel like anger now, only this heavy solid feeling behind my breastbone, the one I recognise as sadness.
“That’s the thing about grief though,” I say, “If you don’t get to process it, it just stays there. Like a block of ice that never melts.”
We sit in silence for a few seconds, and I stop myself again as I notice my need to ask her something about herself, about her family, smooth over all this emotion, make things easier for her. Instead I look her in the eyes and say,
“I appreciate you emailing me and meeting me, and how you’re looking at me right now. And I’m scared to be friends with you again.”
“Scared of what?”
“I’m scared you won’t be honest with me. That if you get angry with me, that you wouldn’t say. I’m scared of caring about you again, and then being cut off and left to try and work out what happened.”
She nods and I think maybe she does get it now, maybe she understands.
“I’d really like to try though,” she says, and her voice is very small, “Do you maybe…want to try?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and check my body again. I’m still scared and sad. “I don’t think so. Not right now. I think I just want to go home.”
I get up from my seat, but she stays sitting, puzzled looking.
“I imagine you’re really confused.”
And I laugh, because it’s all suddenly kind of funny. I’ve waited two decades to have this conversation, drove almost two hours to be here and now I’m leaving after less than thirty minutes.
“Yeah, I am a bit,” she says, and then, “You’re really different to how I remember.”
“Am I?”
I think about that then and half nod,
“I suppose I am. I wasn’t a very happy person back then.”
“And you are now?”
For a minute I think that she’s being sarcastic, but when I look at her upturned face it’s just curious, wondering.
“I am, yes. Probably about 85% of the time.”
“Wow,” she says, “That’s…a lot” and she looks like she actually means it.
And I genuinely wonder for the first time since I sat down opposite her, what her life is like now. Her ideal marriage to her college sweetheart, her beautiful kids, her cool job, is it perhaps not as perfect as it’s always looked to me on social media? Is there some reason she can’t imagine being happy?
I look down at her oh-so-familiar face and I realise that I actually know nothing about this person any more, that for the last two decades I’ve been agonising over a version of someone that no longer exists. And just like her, the version of me that she remembers — that anxious young woman who permanently wore a mask, even around the people she loved —has been changed by time, smoothed, reshaped, repurposed into the person I am right now.
“It was really good to see you B,” I say, because I realise that, despite everything I’d expected, that that is suddenly and inescapably the truth. It really is good to see her. I pick up my handbag and smile -
“I’ll be in touch.”
………………
Law Turley is an MBACP-registered Integrative Therapist and certified Radical Honesty® Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
