Letting Go

Impermanence is the one thing we can count on in life.

We are confronted with this fact every day of our lives, and yet we still cling to the idea that we can hold onto something, whether it's a family tradition, a feeling, a friendship, or even a person, forever.

We are conditioned to believe that this is how things are supposed to be.

Although I understood this in a left-brainy, smart-girl kind of way, last summer was a huge lesson, or lessons, in impermanence. Sometimes you can learn something from a book, read it, understand it, even know it a little, but until you're confronted with a trifecta of it, as I was (Punch! Kick! Wham!) it's pretty easy to forget that life itself is nothing but lessons in impermanance.

The person you think you've fallen in love with tells you "Even if I told you I was falling in love with you, well, too bad! I've changed my mind!"

The old pet you thought maybe had another two or three lives in him, well, you come home and find him stroked out on the kitchen floor in a puddle of his own pee and two hours later you're watching some anonymous doctor inject a drug into a catheter in his leg that stops his heart, while his last breath sounds to you like "thank you."

The morning phone call from your sister, the one that stops you in your tracks in the middle of Park Avenue, saying, "Mom died last night," leaving you with those bright spots in front of your eyes and breath that suddenly won't squeeze past the top of your sternum to get to your lungs.

Things like this will remind you of the impermanence of life.

I used to have a friend whom I called my best friend.

Her name was Juliet. We met when we were both young and beautiful and owned New York City. We were inseparable and did everything together -- movies and brunches and drinks and dinners, long heartfelt conversations on the phone and in bars and in parks and on aimless walks through our City that we both loved as passionately as lovers. We were "Sex and the City" before that show existed.

I spent so much time with her family that the extra bedroom in their Fire Island house was called "Weenie's Room."

Our birthdays were three days apart, and her mother would host a dinner party for Juliet every year at her Riverside Drive apartment. Then I would throw a giant birthday bash for myself (any excuse to throw a party, and my circle of aquaintances was massive back then, and my parties were kind of legendary) with a hundred people jammed into my duplex, and my friend the bar owner having to call in the reinforcement keg from his bar sometime around 2am, and at least one visit from the police. Hey, it was the 90's, we were young, and we were having fun.

In 2000, I went as usual to Gwyneth's to celebrate Juliet's birthday. It was an important dinner, because Juliet was going to introduce me to her new boyfriend, Mark. This was exciting. She had mentioned him a few times on the telephone, but only in passing, so I didn't know how serious it was.

Dinner was lovely, uneventful. I liked Juliet's new boyfriend a lot, mainly because they seemed so smitten with each other. She was clearly delighted with him, and he with her. They made a nice couple.

The next day, I called her to tell her that I liked her boyfriend.

"He really liked you, too," she said. "He called you fascinating and dangerous."

Me, dangerous, ha! As dangerous as a Beanie Baby, right? As for fascinating, I'll take it, but as a girl with a happy childhood and no tragic, dark past, I'd hardly call myself fascinating. Or, maybe, as a former boyfriend once told me, my very ordinariness made me fascinating.

I laughed, yeah, just like I do now, at that description.

Saturday, the night of my birthday party, I got a call from Juliet. She wasn't feeling well, and wouldn't be able to come to the party. Oh well, shit happens, right?

After that, many more phone calls to Juliet went unanswered. At first I shrugged it off -- we New Yorkers tend to leave each other alone when one of our own wants to crawl under the porch. We understand that the very essence of New York City is a surfeit of too-muchness, and sometimes you get a little overwhelmed with the too-muchness of it. You need to escape from it, in the only way that you can. You turn off your phone, and maybe hide out in your apartment for a few days, or take long solitary walks where you don't talk to anyone. If you're looking carefully, you can spot people doing this. They have an inward-turned quality to them. The dimmer switches on their auras are dialed way back. If you look really closely, you can see their doggy eyes peering out from behind the wooden steps of their souls.

When days turned into weeks, then months, the shrug turned into puzzlement turned into hurt. I played our conversations over in my head, again and again, trying to figure out what it was that I had said or done. And I kept coming up empty -- the last conversation I had with Juliet was nothing more than normal. Regular. Ordinary.

"See you Saturday," was probably the last thing I said.

When I decided to leave my one true love, New York City, a few months later, Juliet didn't come to my going-away party, and amongst the friends who had traveled from Connecticut and Philadelphia to see me sail off into a new life, there was an empty, silent, Juliet-shaped hole.

I don't know why Juliet walked away from me, and I never will. All I can do is wonder why she decided that I wasn't important in her life anymore, or how I went from utterly indispensable to completely dispensable in the space of a day or two. I can wonder at how such a seemingly cold-blooded decision could be made. I tried to write stories in my head, then discarded each one because I just couldn't know what had happened to make her say, "she's got to go."

To this day, I wonder.

Three days after 9/11, my phone rang. It was Juliet, sobbing.

"Oh, Aileen, what did they do to our city?" she asked.

I was planning a visit to New York for my birthday. We made plans to see each other.

Circumstances, in the form of Bill the firefighter laying his head in my lap, wrapping his arms around my legs, and crying out, "It should have been me! It should have been me!" intervened, and we didn't meet.

I haven't seen my once-best friend Juliet since 2000, and I can only think "I hope things turned out okay for her." I ran into her mother in a restaurant a couple years ago, and I know she got married, had a baby, lives on the Upper West Side. But I'll never know the rest, and I have to be okay with that. Otherwise the not-knowing would make me crazy.

Unlike made-up stories and books and movies, life doesn't always hand you finite endings. You don't always get, to use a term that I find loathesome and pat, closure. This is life, and sometimes it just sucks like that.

I wish Juliet only well, and hope that she has found happiness, no matter what happened.  Just because we went around different bends in the river doesn't mean she's not there anymore -- I know she's still there, and she'll always be there.

I think that somehow, somewhere, she knows this.

I Don't Think We Actually Are. Friends, That Is. And That's A Damn Shame.

I know how big Paulie felt at the end of "Goodfellas," when he handed Henry Hill three thousand dollars and said, "And now, Henry, I have to turn my back on you."

It makes me so incredibly sad to write this post.

I am a woman of few virtues, but one that I do possess, in spades, is the ability to stare down the truth without blinking.

Even when that truth is sad and upsetting, I am forced, by my inner clockworks, to acknowledge what is true, and real, and not to deceive myself that things are anything but the way they are, rather than the way I wish them to be.

All nice words at the end aside, I don't think we really parted as friends.

All nice words at the end aside, I don't think we will really be friends.

All nice words at the end aside, I don't think we are friends.

See, even though we made all the right friendish noises, and wished each other well, and acknowledged that we started out, sort of, as friends, and hugged it out at the end, the truth is that we won't be friends.

Maybe that's why, when he dropped me off after our coffee, I insisted he get out of the car to say a proper goodbye. Maybe, in my primal lizard brain, I knew that this was a forever kind of goodbye.

It's not because I don't want us to be friends, for I could wish for nothing more. His is one of the sharpest minds, and most slashing wits I've ever encountered.

He is the kind of person that I would fervently want to call my friend. He is the kind of person I would be proud to call my friend.

It's not because of residual romantic feelings that may cloud any encounters further down the road. These too, I know, will pass. They do, after all.

It is because it is not permitted.

He told me this openly, from the beginning, that he is not allowed to have friends that haven't been vetted and approved. He smiled when he told me this. I don't know if it was the nervous smile a dog gives when it is waiting for you to reprimand it, or if it was the smile of a man who is perfectly contented to have things this way. It was some sort of baring of teeth, whatever the hell it meant.

We won't be able to do the things that friends do, like share a laugh over coffee, or have one of those 15-minute phone calls where you check in just to see how things are going. We won't even be able to trade emails in which we tell each other what is going on in our lives. We won't be able to have a drink and have those long, pleasantly rangy conversations that I like to have with my friends that veer from pants-wetting hilarity to deadly serious, the ones where you talk about the world we live in and life in general.

And all because it is not allowed.

I know.

This is a foreign concept to me, too, as so many of my friends are men whom I knew in the wild and wooly days before they got married, and now a good number are men whom I've met in the last few years who are my own age and long-married, who don't actually have to qualify their friendship with me.  Of course, there are also a couple whom upon marriage began the slow withdrawal, the gradual hurtful coldness that was essentially the bridal herd culling, or the couples that turn into permanent "we." You know them. One cannot move without the other. There is no plan with one without the other. I dunno. Why don't I respect these people?

Statistically, in this day and age, and especially at my age, it's impossible to avoid becoming friends with married men. And do married people stop making friends with people on their own upon saying "I Do?" (If that's how it's gotta be, then fuck marriage! Seriously? That is some kind of fucked up.  Is putting on a wedding ring the same as lifting the velvet rope? "Sorry, we're at maximum capacity. Fire Department regulations. No one else allowed in.")

How sad, and how limiting that is. How constricting that must feel.  I find myself looking at every person I meet and speak to with curiosity, asking myself, "Is this my next friend?" And I'm usually the slow one! (Someone said to me, a couple of weeks ago, "I tell you these things because I consider you my friend," and I was both delighted and surprised. I know the weight of the word, and I thanked him for using it.)

It is one thing to remain hidden in shadow by the choices I've made in love, but to have to do so and still pretend to call something "friendship" that isn't really friendship is false, and frankly, that's a plate of shit I'm not willing to eat.

It's insulting. And I won't do it.

I am an insightful listener.  I am smart to talk to and funny as hell. If I had a million dollars and you needed it, I would give it to you. But since I don't have a million dollars, I will give you my time, an ear, a shoulder, and a hand.

I am a great, great fucking friend.

So now you know, I have lines to draw in the sand, too.  And here, right here, this is my line in the sand.  Being friends with me should not be a shameful secret.

He would have to step forward and state, out loud and in public, "This is my friend Aileen. She's fantastic, and smart, and funny, and people like to be around her because she makes a a room seem fizzier, and bigger, and sunnier.  She is my friend, and I picked her."

And I know he won't do it.

So, in this new, seeing "things as they is" (to borrow Suzuki Roshi's words) phase of my life, I have to admit to myself the really, really, really hard truth, which is:

As much as I am capable of being friends with someone I have loved -- another one of my meager fucking virtues -- and as much as I would like it to be so, I don't believe we actually are, nor will we be, friends.

So I will just retreat, and retreat, and retreat, until I've disappeared again and become a handful of pixel dust and a few funny words sprinkled across his screen once again.

And all because it's not allowed.

And that is perhaps my biggest heartbreak of all.