grieving my favorite people

TW: mental health, suicide, grief

It’s been officially two years since I lost my best friends of 12 years. No, they’re not dead, they’re just not doing this life with me anymore. I met them in 2011, while in a relationship with an aquarian woman, who thought commitment was more of a suggestion than anything else. I met one of them through, said ex, and it felt like the first time in my life I found a warm bed, a seat at the table, a table, even a friend. Growing up as a queer, Panjabi, first-born daughter to immigrant parents with traumas I can’t even begin to unfold here in this essay, my childhood was sad, diabolically sad, and lonely (seriously, it wasn’t until my mid 20’s that I even discovered other gay or queer Panjabis). I grew up constantly yearning for closeness and relationships but could not cultivate them for the life of me because I was too busy trying to perform “perfect daughter” for parents who rarely had the capacity to notice my efforts.

Anyways, fast forward 21 years, I finally found “them”. I found my people. We were a group of four, two queers and two straights that got drunk often and stayed in bed, laid up, side by side, aware that no matter how hard or confusing it got out there, we had this soft place to land. We were close! So close, people would tell us they began questioning their own friendships after witnessing ours. On my 23rd birthday, I got so drunk I threw up in my best friends bed and both of my best friends undressed me, showered me, and put me to sleep on newly washed sheets. Yeah, I thought I was saved and yes I mean the “saved” that Christians talk about when they find Jesus. These friends were more than just “some people I fell into after a shitty breakup”, they were a soft place I had been searching for, for many years. They kind of saved my life. It didn’t matter to them that I was gay, bi, hairy, struggling with my identity 24 hours a day or too opinionated for my own good. They just wanted me to show up, take a shot and respond in the group chat titled “Tew Cute For You”, in a timely manner.

As it goes for many friend groups, each one has its own dynamics and the dynamic running this group was clear as day. We had a main “anchoring” friend who was best friends with each of us and eventually merged us all into a group but we knew deep down who kept us tethered to one another. My main best friend, the “anchoring” friend, the friend I spoke with in my native tongue, connected with about our experiences as Brown people in the US and shared all the complexities that came with being “non-traditional Indian daughters”. I loved her in a way that made my heart feel warm, safe, but also worried for my own good. I fell in love with her from the moment she sent me a BBM after my ex told her “my gf is indian too, you guys should be friends” I was always inspired by her ability to be herself but always weary of being too much of myself, fearing I would throw off the “balance” and threaten the hierarchy that existed in the shadows of our group dynamic. I chose her and I would’ve chosen her in every lifetime after that, but our relationship felt like spiritual on the good days but volatile on the bad ones. She would offer explanations about why she treated me the way she did. It was because she loved me so much and because I knew her so well that I got to see the real her. She would say “I know you will never leave me after seeing the real me” and she was right because I would never leave. In fact, I didn’t think I even could, so I wore my position as a badge of honor, like a proud best friend would.

I thought I was willing to endure what came with the friendship but it became clear to me over time, I couldn’t. I feared everything about losing her. Her family became my family, her home a respite from the chaos in mine, her friends my community, and the friendship, a reminder that I wasn’t unlovable. I tried to get her to go to therapy with me but the time was never right, there was always a man, another friend, or other matters of importance that would always come first. It was in 2019 that I first shared with her the pain and trauma I felt from our friendship and from that point, our journey to “repair” had ensued. We tried (I think?). I tried (I think?). I spent sessions on sessions in therapy, multiple therapists, reflecting on what was and how I could help us get somewhere new, somewhere better, somewhere we could just be two best friends who loved each other without it hurting so much. It wasn’t too soon after that, my resentment creeped up like a shadow that followed me around anytime I was with my friend group. The resentment like a shadow mocking me, poking at me, entrusting that I would keep the big ugly feelings festering inside of me to myself and allow for a wound to form that could never heal. My resentment wasn’t just towards her but also for my other two best friends who stood by and would rather not get involved to keep themselves in good graces.

In 2022, my therapist Yael, an orthodox Jewish woman who introduced me to IFS helped me explore the different parts of my Internal Family System. I started piecing the narratives and stories that lived in me together and locating when and where those parts were birthed. It became clear to both my therapist and I, that I struggled with symptoms of C-PTSD, and my complex trauma influenced how I showed up in most of my personal relationships, work relationships and the relationship I had with myself. It was clear that I felt safest in abusive relationships because I felt like I had no other choice. While Yael offered me validation, support, reflection, an invitation to accountability, and much needed compassion; it still wasn’t enough. She assigned me with homework to share vulnerably the journey I was on, with my best friends and to offer a space for dialogue around what would come next in our friendships as I embraced this internal work.

I set up a meeting with my best friends and wrote up an outline, a proposal, call it a presentation, and prepared a reading from, “A Little Life”, about how it felt like to be in loving and devoted friendships. I cried, I shook, I hoped for the best but ended up in the worst case scenario, one I never fully recovered from. My offering to repair, to re-imagine, to mend, was crumbled up, rolled into a ball and shot across the half-court line, barely touching the net or rim. This was in 2023 and it was in 2023, that “Tew Cute for You” went dark.

There are five stages of grief, ten steps in addiction recovery but I could not find God damn steps on grieving my favorite people in the whole wide world. I was watching “Paradise” on Hulu the other day and a character in the show is sitting in her grief counselor’s office after losing her son and says to her, “time isn’t making it better, time is just taking me farther away from when he was here with me”. While I haven’t experienced the death of a child or a loved one, this loss feels like the closest I’ve come to it by far. Some days it’s even difficult to understand what died and what survived. Every day, I get farther away from a time I knew friendship. Every day, I get farther from a point in time where I know what it is to perform friendship, to express friendship, to sit comfortably in the margins of friendship and all its fucking glory. Oh, to sit in a room with strangers that become friends that become laughter, a full stomach, a nap, a hug, a corner seat on the couch, a day at the beach laid up like sardines, a car ride with the windows down, blasting the same song for the 100th time.

Friendship is to have your own certified parking spot in this big world, a chair to lean on to put on your shoes, a moment to breathe, to rest, reflect, be grace, offer grace, and fuck up as many times as it takes to learn the lesson. The part of me who knew what friendship feels like is dying every day and the more time that passes, I feel farther and farther away from the version of me who feels capable of feeling it again. I don’t just feel a loss of “friendship”, I feel like my world has been chipped away at, chiseled into a marble, while the world around me continues to grow. It genuinely makes me want to run and hide. I fear I won’t remember what it feels like to be in the presence of someone who loves me not because they are family, blood, or someone I fuck. I feel at the mercy of others, I feel completely naked begging to be absolved of this loss like it was a sin I committed rather than a choice that made itself. I feel discarded and forgotten.

I haven’t really made new friends since, not ones that feel the same, not ones I can even call close. This grief just feels too big, like experiencing multiple deaths at once. I may just be fragile or maybe susceptible to obsess over my own suffering but all I know, is this fucking sucks. There isn’t a social script on friendship, digesting the loss of it, how to start over, how to recover, how to begin again. The “loneliness epidemic” has made that clear, but in a perfect world, there’s a detailed 10 step program, a communal space where I go every Tuesday evening and declare “Hi, I’m Preanka and I’ve got no friends”, followed by a group discussion on the road to recovery and healing. I want so badly to move on, but I feel angry, mad, disgusted I continue to yearn for people who just carried on in friendship without me, a new group, a group of 3 not 4, with a new group chat, with a new name I’ll never know.

I’m forever changed by this loss and I fear we don’t share out loud how much of a loss it truly is to lose friendship. I fear we use friends as place holders for romance, for childhood trauma, for self-care, for self, but for me, friendship was the picket line when I wanted to be dead. I want us to be honest about this. I want us to unpack this and unlearn how we currently see friendship, I want us to treat our friends better and with more care. I want us to sit for hours staring out the window and longing for friendship the way we do periodic romances. I want us to step outside our capitalistic and individualistic driven selves and be fucking for real about how friendship outlives marriages, engagements, inpatient visits, outpatients visits, dead parents, dead pets, jobs, wars, and fascist governments.