The knife of letting go

As teenagers, Ali, Corie, Katie, and I swore we would be friends forever. They kept that promise — but only to each other.

We planned our adolescence to end together, in a sense, the close of day in mid-August, 2019. In less than 12 hours I’d be on a plane across the country to start college in D.C. I’d be the first to go; then Ali to Berkeley, Corie to New York, and finally Katie, across town to State.

On that last Friday — which, in later years, I would think of as the last of my childhood in San Diego — college was only an unrealized future, a question hanging over our heads. We knew everything would change, but in the moment, we had each other. The sky burned lilac and the water was cold when we dove beneath the waves at sunset. We had to coax Katie to come in; like the shy blond child she was in years before I knew her, she lingered at the water’s edge, unwilling to shed that red Wisconsin hoodie and swim with us. Come in, we beckoned. It’s not that cold at all.

At some point that summer Corie gave us each a letter. I never saw what went into the others, but in mine, she reminisced about our hijinks, she told me all the things she loved about me. I still have it pinned to a cork board in the room that I grew up in. It was unimaginable that we could ever not be that close, that we could ever be as distant as we became.

But everything was different in less than a year.

Ten months later, our friendship crumbled in the space of a text. I hadn’t meant to look, but I saw it — a flash of light in the fraction of a moment my hand passed over the screen. It was a message on Ali’s phone, from Corie, in a group chat that also included Katie. It was a group chat between the three of them — a group chat without me.

We were one year in college, the first Covid summer, and we’d taken a road trip to my family’s cabin in Lake Tahoe. It was there, in the twin bedroom I used to share with my sister, that the end of our friendship began.

Or maybe it was already ending by then. I had a hard time pinpointing exactly when it all changed. There was no explosion, no big fight, no definitive moment in which we decided we were done. Instead, we slowly drifted — not in four cardinal directions but asymmetrically, the three of them in one way, and me in another.

These were the people with whom I clicked so naturally that I can’t even remember an origin story. One day I was 15 years old and bumbling through high school and the next, I had Ali, Corie, and Katie. I was no longer a mere “I,” but part of a “we.” I had people who wanted to have lunch with me. I had friends I could text on the weekends without worrying that I annoyed them. In a room full of people I only half-knew, I would always look for them first.

So much of our friendship developed in the four miles between high school and the beach, the four of us piled into Corie’s two-door Mini Cooper or Ali’s Jeep, rushing off to bagels or pho or California burritos. There was the surf at Tower 4, the CVS on Coast Hwy where we bought liquor with a fake ID, the taco shop we’d frequent after football games on Fridays. Years later, deep in my twenties, I’d return and find these places looked no different but felt askew. In youth, I’d never visited any of them alone. 

Recently I listened to a review of my favorite book, My Brilliant Friend. In it, the journalist Greg Cowles comments, “Any great literature of friendship is a story of adolescence,” because adolescence is the time in which our identities are informed by our friendships. It comes after the formation of self which is based on family and before the formation of self that’s based on romance, Cowles explains. In these teenage years, we discover and define who we are by how we relate to our friends.

My friendship with Ali, Corie, and Katie was the friendship that I trusted to hold me through school dances without dates and lonely nights I was left uninvited from parties. They were the people with whom I shared a first taste of alcohol. They taught me how to behave around boys I liked and boys I didn’t. They told me when I was behaving badly and made me change my behavior — their opinions meant the world to me.

Over the years, we’d gone through flare-ups, fights, ice-outs, the dramatic transition from high school to college. The seasons turned, we grew taller, and always we found our way back to each other.

In the spring of 2020, I needed them. I was losing connection with school; San Diego and the life I had there seemed the only point of light in my periphery. That semester, I’d been unceremoniously dumped by a would-be roommate. I was dealing with the breakup of my freshman-year friend group.

Then the pandemic came and stuffed us all back in our parents’ homes. To others it was a curse; to me, it was a godsend. I hadn’t made lasting friends in college. But at home I had Ali, Corie, and Katie. In June we gathered in my backyard with our laptops before us, planning our summer road trip. A perfect escape from the world crumbling outside.

And yet: the group chat. Ours had fizzled out almost a year ago, but theirs hadn’t. The veneer of safety I’d built around that road trip collapsed around me. We were in my family’s house. I was hosting, and yet I was left out.

I never brought it up to them, but I agonized over it for months. In San Diego again, I could feel that things had changed. I could feel them drifting away from me. When the pandemic ended and we went back to school, spreading out over the four corners of the country, I watched through digital windows as their friendship, which I had once been wrapped in, hurtled on without me.

There were moments I thought I could save it. When they invited me to Bruges with them two years after the Tahoe trip, that semester we all studied abroad, I thought I might make my way back to them.

Instead, I blew 200 euro on a shitty cigarette-reeking hotel room two floors below the one the three of them crammed into. It was clear I had been a last-minute addition. Ali, out of pity or compassion or a mix of both, came down and slept in the room with me.

“I didn’t want you to be alone,” she said. Her kindness cut like a knife.

The invites stopped coming by our senior year of college. Though by then I knew it was over, I still felt a pang in my ribs whenever I saw them together on social media. At Halloween, Ali and Katie had flown from California to visit Corie in New York. It wasn’t the distance — I was in D.C., I could’ve made the journey even more easily. But I hadn’t been asked.

Every post I saw cut a little deeper, like a bruise I kept pressing on. I had this feeling I shouldn’t be watching their friendship through these perfectly curated windows. But I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like if I was there, too.

I turned over the reasons why I’d been left behind so many times over the years. I knew I wasn’t the best friend in high school. I was selfish, self-conscious, insecure, and unsure of who I wanted to be. But as teenagers, aren’t we all a little self-obsessed and cruel? Could I be blamed for not being a great person because I was 16 years old?

I thought that maybe our friendship had all been smoke and mirrors. I started second-guessing every moment, going back to the start. But that wasn’t true, either — at one point we had really been inseparable. I still have the letter Corie wrote me after our high school graduation, the one where she told me all the things she loved about me. It’s a reminder I was there. I was a real part of that friend group, once. I hadn’t always been on the outside looking in.

Over the years I continued to reach out, but it was humiliating when they wouldn’t do the same. I reached out to Corie four times before I gave up. Katie came and stretched out beside me on the beach, but she never asked me first. I see Ali from time to time, and she calls me once a quarter, but we’re no longer in each other’s lives. We’re just telling each other about ours. 

It’s been five years since I was a real part of their circle. We’ve seen each other every year since we graduated high school, but for the most part, the ease and familiarity we had is a memory. They live in San Diego now, three thousand miles from me. They don’t read what I write.

I still feel some sadness when I see them all together, but I’ve stopped tearing myself apart for not being there. We share a history, if not a present. I’ve let go of the old belief that I’ll be at their weddings, a pretense I’d clung to even as we grew apart. When you’re a kid and so deeply in love with the friendships you have, it’s impossible to imagine they could one day float away.

The hardest part of letting go has been giving up the search for a reason why. In my career and in my studies, I’ve been trained to always ask why. I was taught to think deeper about a phenomenon, to examine its causes, to uncover the forces beneath it. Accepting that some things have no real explanation — that life moves us apart or together, and that we might not have a say in it — is antithetical to the way I’m used to thinking about this world. I can’t pretend it wasn’t painful to see a relationship I was once privy to continue on behind barriers of glass. But it’s getting easier. 

And that’s the other thing — I’ve come to believe there isn’t really a reason I was left behind. I don’t think any of my old friends bore me any malice, I don’t think they thought about why they no longer wanted to hold me close. Corie invited me to her party in December. Katie lit up when she saw me there, and she wanted to hear about my life. Ali calls and I answer, even if it’s just the highlight reel broadcast over heartlands or oceans. What I feel for them now is the ember of old friendship. I’m waving at them across a chasm, over a distance none of us will close.

At core, I’m not a different person than I was when we first met. But I am different. I won’t blame myself for drifting away from a friendship that is now between three adult women, not four teenage girls.

Besides, they’re different too. Through all of the heartbreak and trials of their early 20s, I wasn’t there to comfort or coach any of them. I wasn’t there to celebrate their victories. I only learned about the heavy decisions, the incandescent moments long after the fact, when the ink had dried on everything.

I can’t get back what we had, but I’ll continue to root for each of them. I’ll follow Corie’s photography and Katie’s writing. I hope Ali gets to save lives like she wants to. I hope they go to all the places we once dreamed of seeing together. I’m okay with knowing I won’t be there with them. I’ll still be there when they need me.

If there is a lesson in the loss, it’s that it makes the friendships I have now even more precious. I see how thinly we’re all held together; I approach my relationships with the knowledge that they may not last. Through no fault of our own, we may drift until the line goes silent. And that awareness, of the delicateness of friendship, makes me cherish the people I know and the intimacy we have even more. The moments we share, the people we are now, and what we mean to one another — inevitably those will change. But what is a friendship if not a willingness to be changed by others?