Friendship & Grief: Holding the Story Only

I've always been perplexed by how effortless female friendships are supposed to be--as portrayed in movies, books and TV shows. Friendships were never that easy for me.

As a kid, having an incredibly fun, outgoing and winning twin sister didn't help matters. One time I invited a classmate over for a sleepover. We must have been around 9 or 10 years old. By the next day, the classmate and my sister were as thick as peas in a pod, chattering away as I trailed behind them, alone. I may or may not have been crying. Wow, this is a horrible story. Moving on.

Things certainly haven't always been as bleak in the friendship department. And after I moved to LA almost four years ago, I've seen and felt my close friendships deepen and grow.

Friendship is easily one of the best things about life.

I've found that there's an element of mystery to friendship. I'm not sure I can fully explain why I have the friends that I do. [Yeah, not completely buying the genetic similarity explanation, sorry.]

There are some people you meet and everything points to the fact that you should be bff's, but you're not. You have it all: shared interests, mutual friends, the same social group, shared beliefs, a similar sense of humor and appreciation for the finer points of medieval Norse, but yet there's that certain something that's missing.

As one friend explained to me once over tea in a trendy (is there any other kind) LA coffee shop:

"There are some people that you miss when they're gone. You feel it here."--holding her hand to her heart.

That's probably the most accurate definition of friendship I've ever heard. 

And that's the thing--you don't necessarily choose this feeling. You can have it for someone you've just met or someone you've known for 15 years. You can experience it after one conversation or 20. You can have it for someone who could be your personality twin or someone whose ways and means are as mysterious as the origin story for french toast.

To recap: Friendship. Awesome. Mystery. French toast.

All that to say, I'm currently experiencing something that feels a lot like grief.

More recently, friendship has felt a lot like the memoir class I took last year, a class in which each week, several people brought in their living, breathing, gasping-for-air stories.

And Samantha reads her story out loud. And the room falls completely silent in the presence of such naked, vital vulnerability.

And I'm sitting in my seat holding the story in my cupped hands--trying to--struggling so hard not to crush it. And the air is electric and thick with beauty, loss, grief. And I'm completely still as I hear about losing a child, becoming a mother, caring for aging grandparents.

It feels sacred. This story-cradling.

And I don't know how else to describe how friendship feels sometimes.

As if I'm holding my friend's story. Awed by her beauty. Crushed by her fragility. Desperately hopeful for her future and protective of her past.

There is pain in the tension of not yet.

I have these moments. I think everyone has these moments.

All I can do is hold the story. Without altering it to make it easier to take, or trying to "fix" it, or pretending that the painful parts don't exist, or going on as if everything's okay when it isn't.

Sometimes it's just not okay.