(no subject)

This weekend, I need to clean up some bits of my life.

I found out yesterday - because my mother found out the day before - that a woman who abandoned their friendship about twenty years ago died last year. It's been really strange to realise that we've been talking about Berkeley without knowing that - even two weeks ago we had a conversation about friendship that included my mom saying that if Berkeley called her tomorrow she would be able to speak to her, that the pain of the severance had eased enough that she would want to know why. This was provoked by my saying that when I have a friend who abandons me (or who I suppose I abandon) I want to know why. I won't fight you for the right to maintain a friendship you're not interested in, but I want to know why you've decided you can't be my friend, because otherwise, there are just unresolved bits of me out there in the world.

This is something like the mouse tattoo, I suppose, for those who read that post, ages ago.

So I have two plans of attack. One is to write letters to people that I am no longer able to contact - an excellent example is Evil Chris The Ex. The idea came about when I found a love letter in a book in the Pitt-Rivers library. My theory is, if you write a letter to the person who is no longer part of your life, you take it to a library and put it in a book. It will, someday, get where it needs to go, wherever that is. The person who finds it may ignore it, but you have to assume that they were where it needed to be, and maybe they'll know something from your letter.

The other is to write letters to some people I know who are currently being out of contact. I do require certain levels of interaction to assume that we have a relationship, and if you're being unwilling to go to lunch with me, call me, or get coffee with me, I have to assume that we no longer have a relationship. If that's in error, I want to give these people the chance to know that this is what I think - without judgement, but it's not a friendship if it's been eight months since you've initiated contact with me. I learned that a long time ago - there are too many people in the world who are willing to let you contact them but with no invested interest themselves, and I can't have time for those people any longer. It's too hard, and it's too pointless. I'd rather find out that the relationship should be severed, because then at least we can wrap things up on the same page.

I never want to find out that someone's been waiting twenty years for me to pull my head out of my ass and in the meantime I've died. Never. I can't conceive of voluntarily doing that to someone; that's what the unresolved nature of one-sided friendship-cancelling does. I promise: I can hear that you no longer want to be my friend without killing myself.

I can't believe that this has happened - it is so much more painful than my grandfather's death, and that's one I thought was unresolved. But I knew him, I know that he thought that if it was meant to be, it would happen, and I know that my mother had the chance to see him before he died. For her, that situation is resolved, and for me, I have to trust that someday, wherever we are, I'll have the chance to talk to him again and he'll know why I didn't take the time to come visit this month.

Though if he hadn't died, I'd be writing this from Montana, "almost" only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades.

It's time to get this cleaned up.