A Boulder in the River

What is that feeling when your bestfriend and her boyfriend both
have up away messages referencing the same shared activity while your
home alone with your dog watching Star Trek? Is it jealously? Is it
feeling left out, unloved and unimportant? Is it envy, anger, or plain
old sadness? Could be a bizzare mixture of all of these things or none
of them at all?


You love her. She's your bestfriend. I mean, she's held your
hair while you've thrown up and you've borrowed her underwear. You want
her to be happy and your psyched that she's met a great guy, but
there's that feeling. And it's just not going away. It strikes all of a
sudden, when they laugh at some private joke or you notice how they
hold hands absent-mindedly. It's this quiet sad kind of sinking
emotion. Something in your heart sighs.


But what is it? It might be jealously. I mean, sure who
wouldn't want to be coupled up and sublimely happy in love? Well, for
one thing, it's not sublime for them. No, no. She does bitch about him,
about how he sometimes wears the same clothes two days in a row, needs
to hit the gym a little more often, has odd secret hand gestures with
his friends, etc. For another thing, you don't want to be coupled up,
period. You don't miss the bullshit of boyfriends, the arguments about
ridiculous subjects, the emotional upheavel when he doesn't call and
says jerky things. Not to mention that heartbreak when it's all over
and the time it takes to get over it and meet someone else so it can
repeat again and again. No, you've finially woken up and realized the
perils of love and the perks of singledom.


So it's not jealously. Perhaps it's that whole third wheel
feeling when you're with them, left out when you're not thing. Yea,
your feeling left out, like an old toy on Christmas. The two of you
were inseparable. Best friends. Thelma and Louise. You talked every
day. You had tons of funny references to things that no one else got
because they weren't there when it started. You shopped together. You
cried at Lifetime movies together. You baked cookies at 2 am and you
laughed until dawn. And then one day you came to the realization that
everything had changed. You'd get her voice mail all the time. It took
a few days for her to call you back. When she did call you back every
other word out of her mouth was her boyfriend's name. And she never had
time to talk, just a quick, polite return phone call. FYI, the quick,
polite return phone call is a real slap in the face of friendship.
Friends aren't polite, friends are honest and real and don't call to be
polite. They call to talk and because they care. Oh, the polite return
phone call is your breaking point. You begin to dislike the boy and for
no valid reason. You won't admit to yourself that you miss your
bestfriend and blame him for taking away her time and attention, but
God, do you ever. Until they have a fight, and she calls you. Or until
they have mind-blowing kinky sex and she calls you. Yea, she calls you.
Your still her confidant, her most trusted ally in this crazy world in
which we live. You realize that while she's focused in other
directions, your still her bestfriend. No boyfriend could ever replace
you. Ever.


So that feeling which transpires in the bottom of your
stomach when they get all mushy in public isn't jealousy and it isn't
feeling left out. So what the hell is it? I think it's the same feeling
I got when I graduated high school. Or when my first live-in boyfriend
moved out. It's the same as the day I went with my parents to drop my
brother off at college. It's no different than the first day I walked,
all by myself, through the quad at college.


It's the feeling of absolute total and utter powerlessness
against everything in this world that is changing. The good old days
are gone. Things have changed somehow and no one asked you if it was
okay. No one prepared you, or warned you, they just expected you to
roll with it. That feeling you get when you notice their away messages
is the feeling of not rolling with life. It's being the boulder in the
middle of a rushing river. Everything is moving and you're standing
still. And it sucks.


So you just gotta start rolling with it.