Feb 28,2014; My heart bled. I began to understand what it was like to mourn. Countless nights when you just wake up and all you can think of is that "She's gone." Then the tears start falling again. It wasn't like the 1996 collapse of our friendship when my studies declined and I got sick(for someone who hardly succumbs to such and is a studious student it was bad). This time, everything that I thought was frozen in time came back. All my emotions came flooding in. It was like a Tsunami that overtook me and started tearing at my every limb." How could she do this to me again?! This is so unfair. "All those unanswered questions rushed back in. "Why did she have to cut me off from her life? What did I do to deserve such treatment? "
Remorse. Anger. Regret. Loss. Just that feeling of emptiness and utter helplessness. "Why God?" Elizabeth Browning wrote about The Art of Losing...but what is artistic about that??? It is the devastation of Losing. The incomparable feeling of emotional pain and anguish. I agree with Emily Dickinson that "Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need to know of hell." To be estranged. To have been broken.
As I reflect on the word frozen, I think about frozen vegetables.As opposed to boiling them then refrigerating, freezing vegetables actually preserve the nutrients better. The "gift" of not knowing the cause for the break-up between the two sisters...why there was this wall between them, was more hurtful to Anna. Me, on the other hand, knowing why things happened didn't help either.
I felt so unwanted, unloved, forsaken and totally abandoned. Sure, it made me into who I am today but it has marked me for life. Most of those who mean something to me eventually learn about her and how she influenced my life.
As I recalled about the little I knew about her, I wondered whether I really came to know her. My memory of who she was to me was pushed aside, swept under the rug and thrown into the abyss of forgetfulness. But more than a dozen times when she was still alive she would visit me in dreams. It was a constant reminder of a failed friendship. And for someone like me who prides herself of being a champion of true friendship (male or female) it was a heartbreak that kept crushing my very being. I would feel worthless, invaluable, disposable and utterly forgettable every time I would dream about her.
So why is this about me? Because to write about her is to write my story. It is said that "Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars
It was an accident that fatally wounded her. But it was no accident that she became endeared to my heart. She had once explained to me that the reason Shakespeare's tragic love stories endure and why they are such great romance is because someone dies. The love never dies.
There's no annulment. No nasty divorce. No child custody battle.
Although I am not far from being guilt-free. Once I was able to rectify and ask for forgiveness from someone whose letters I tore away and returned. That was in grade school and it was not til 2008 that I was able to reconnect with the person I wronged(and he's still a friend).
Do I wish for 5 more years? No, I only wish for a moment. To look into her eyes and see if there's something left of me. Because she was like a mirror. She reflected who I was. I saw parts of me I would never have realized if not for her. She was my Reader's Digest, my radio and my journal. These days she would be comparable to being my facebook, my android, and my eye glasses.
What was I to her? I once was "A Phantom of Delight" to her, her "Favorite Person" but was banished into obscurity. Oblivion.
It is an exaggeration though because before she passed away she addressed me directly with my name when she corrected me that it has been 20 yrs since high school graduation and not 10. That was our only link, our e-group. I once unsubscribed from the first e-group via yahoo and was about to do the same...
