Friends of Three, Let it Be
As the title suggests, this is the wisdom and words that someone once very dear to me spoke like gospel. In friend groups of three, one is always left out. The dynamic doesn't work, there is no balance.
It functions akin to a lopsided seesaw.
Unfortunately, this is the painful story of how I came to find this truth out for myself.
The story starts with Link, my beloved dog. I was a Resident Advisor for my university at the time and had just gone through the breakup to end all breakups. We shared a dog, of which he claimed ownership of (the pet insurance was in his name, I was powerless to refute him). And so, he took the dog and I was left with an empty apartment and nursing school to finish.
I wanted a companion.
My search led me to Link.
After a successful trial adoption and total adoration of one another, I adopted him. He became family to me and we've been inseparable ever since.
Enter my employer, like black-and-white lightning in a silent film.
My boss told me I simply could not have him, despite my coworkers having pets. Despite my having a pet just recently. Despite my having paid the hefty pet fee.
Her reason? His weight. Some of my residents had dogs that made him look chihuahua small, we're talking full-on Saint Bernard heftiness here. An absurd and completely cruel principle to selectively impose on me.
So I was given a choice; Link or the job.
They were legally able to do this because, in order to become a Resident Advisor, you sign a binding contract that basically enslaves you to the university. You're their bitch, and they call the shots on your housing in exchange for whatever they need (my contract literally said this in fine print). So, being me and having nowhere to live in my college years, I obliged. I was good at my job and had been successful in staying out of their drama-filled power trips. I kept to my duties and hung my head low, as I saw the retaliation they often enforced to those who dare color outside the
lines.
I did this for nearly three years, which was enough of a grace period to warrant their sites to be acutely honed in on me. My time of invisibility was up.
I obviously chose Link, like they knew I would.
So they gracefully (this is sarcasm) gave me a week to pack my things and be out of my apartment, turn in my keys, etc.
It was an awful, dreadful time to be me. Nursing school was ramping up (and is notoriously unforgiving, mind you), I was reeling from a breakup that split the sky, and now I was about to be homeless.
Great!
So I went searching for places to live, people to room with. Anything.
Enter the duo soon-to-be-made trio. They were fellow soon-to-be-nurses as well, and had become fond friends of mine. We will call them Dianna and Jude. Jude was a fellow ResLife'er who gave up the toxic position in favor of something more favorable. She was an esteemed member of an on-campus sorority and had lightning wit that could split rocks, but was somehow also incredibly lazy. Dianna was a religious girl from a small town, here to answer her spiritual calling to care for others.
They invited me to live with them, and I accepted.
I did for two years, as a matter of fact. We drank and cried together. We overshared and argued over bathroom rights. We went on weekend trips to Chicago and even got matching tattoos; all of our birth flowers in a bundle underneath our left clavicle. We became nurses (RN's!) together, which might as well be trauma bonding.
However, Jude and Dianna were an inseparable pair. They had unspoken telepathy that had a knack for blocking out the me-signals. When they weren't together, they were on the phone with one another. We had a group chat that they forgot to use, forgot to include me on their life's happenings. There were times where they forgot that I was in the same room, and I might as well have shot myself out of the atmosphere.
Over time, I got to be out of their orbit entirely. Because of one acute event.
It was an awful winter that chilled my heart to from ember to stone. I had lost my job and become a vegetable waiting for a new fellowship to start (in a field that now captivates and invigorates me). I had no money, and was wildly depressed.
My thoughts were an accumulating fog, inching closer and closer to taking over my entire brain.
Until, one day, it did; and a horrible whiteout ensued.
I remember inhaling massive amounts of helium in an attempt to extinguish any ember left in me.
For good.
I was unsuccessful and saved, the fog cleared to reveal several thousand feet of sunshine.
But, I still had some clouds to fight off. Clouds that talked about awful things; clouds reminiscent of their almost-victory of an eternal sunless sky.
I needed my friends, I needed to lean on them.
But these friends, they were not the same ones that I had made years ago. They were not those innocent girls, arm-in-arm with me as we tried to figure out this thing called life.
I tried anyway. I tried to with Dianna and Jude. I chiseled away at my stoney heart and willed them to help me spark an ember again. I broke down the dam and a typhoon of me overtook their ears. I opened up, like I hadn't in months and months and months.
But the water seemed to have drowned my voice. We made plans to hang out and, on the day of the event, I came home to a get-together of their friends. Their carefree and distracted laughter was so far away from me, like they were on an island all their own.
They simply forgot
about me
as simply as they had heard of me to begin with.
It crushed me, and I built a solid wall of concrete several hundred feet deep in all directions from here to nantucket. I encased myself in concrete and hired a full border patrol to keep them out.
I noticed that I had a nagging feeling inside of me that detested the both of them, that screamed "DANGER, DANGER" at the top of its lungs at the sight of them. Jude was a vapid narcissist, and Dianna (with her kind and huge heart) poured her entire self into that friendship. In retrospect, I saw this. I saw this unbreakable, positive-feedback cycle forming and I ran right into it. I took that voice in my hands and shoved it in a drawer in the very back of my mind.
I ignored my instincts with them, and in turn I let them hurt me.
And guess what? Our lease still had five more agonizing months left in it.
Five months that I used to build distance between the island of them and the ship of me.
It got so bad that once, when I was in the basement doing laundry, Jude came into the empty living room and said "oh, thank god" at the sight of a room free of me. Dianna, who was on the phone with her, giggled at this. It tore my heart in two.
They ganged up on me and built an ice palace on their them island.
They chalked up my cold shoulder to me being some kind of bitter villain. To jealousy. To being a bog witch. To being Hitler's descendent; whatever it is that they gab endlessly about.
When, in reality, if they dared look . . . they would find the missing link in their calendars.
The one that they must've took and, along with me in it, crumpled up and tossed to the wind.
So anyways, my wonderful lover and I are moving in together. We have one more insufferable week of passive aggressive ice island antics before we move on from this altogether.
Here's to the end of the feeling-like-a-bag-of-bones era!
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