Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [4]
“He wined her and dined her and jetted her off to Europe while I stayed home alone in our dumpy old apartment,” Donna recalls. Gayle began sleeping at his apartment most nights and announced that she would be officially moving in with her boyfriend by the end of the semester. The two girlfriends began spending less and less time together. Donna felt hurt that Gayle never thought about including her as part of a threesome to hang out, go for dinner, or see a movie. “When certain yearly events came up that we always attended together, Gayle informed me that she’d now be going with her boyfriend and his friends,” Donna says. “I felt truly left out. I was dumped.”
The winter break that year was a sad and lonely time for Donna, who felt like she had outlived her usefulness as a friend and had been tossed aside. For the first few months, she dreaded the thought of coming home to an empty apartment. Then Donna realized that she needed to pull herself together and complete her college education. Like the stereotype of a lonely, single woman, she even adopted a Himalayan cat.
During the spring semester, she met a guy whom she began to see regularly, changed jobs, and made new living arrangements because she didn’t make enough money to support the apartment she and Gayle had lived in together.
Years went by without any contact between the former friends. “I never heard from her, but I’d heard through the grapevine that she and the ‘true love’ that she had dumped me for had broken up,” says Donna. A lesser friend might have gotten some perverse pleasure in hearing about the split, but not Donna: “I was glad because he wasn’t a good egg, and I had wondered about how she was doing. I missed her still, but so much time had passed that I figured she was gone from my life forever.”
That was indeed the case until one Sunday afternoon, almost ten years later, when the phone rang and it was Gayle. “She had tracked me down where I was living across the country in Oregon,” says Donna. Her friend apologized for what had happened and admitted that she hadn’t been a good friend. Gayle told Donna how bad she had felt. She said she even had disturbing dreams about that time in her life.
“She had missed me as much as I missed her,” says Donna. “The funny thing was that I was thrilled to hear her voice and I forgave her immediately. We basically picked up where we’d left off, except now I was living thousands of miles away with my fiancé and Gayle was married to a different guy and had three kids.” The reconnection was almost instantaneous. The two friends remain in touch, sending each other birthday and Christmas gifts and emails, and catching up on the phone whenever they can. “I flew out to Michigan and had the chance to spend some time with her and her family,” says Donna. “It’s great to have Gayle back in my life. It was like a hole had been filled up again, and I think we’ll be friends forever.”
Only in retrospect could Donna begin to understand and put her fractured friendship in perspective. Like most best friends, Donna had hoped that her friendship with Gayle would be a constant in her life. After all, they clicked immediately and had an intimate, reciprocal friendship while it lasted. While she was disappointed and hurt when she was abandoned for a guy who turned out to be a dud, Donna chose to let her friend make her own decisions