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This is the year in which friends cut me off.
Not all of them but some.
So: Subtract some from nine or ten.
By "cut off" I mean stopped communicating. No one shouted and stomped off, or flounced as females do in antique books. They simply slipped away.
We who are cut off wonder: Did they do this to me wittingly, like frightened witnesses fleeing a crime scene? Or was I forgotten through attrition, by default?
When friendships end in fights, we know. But when they just fade, atomizing into ever-after silence, we do not. No sparks, no flare, no warning blare.
We wonder: Was I so weird or annoying or boring as to have forfeited my privilege to be rudimentarily cherished?
Or was I wrong to believe he or she was my friend? One study shows that only half of those we consider our friends would call us theirs.
We know only this: Moments arrived in which individuals we liked decided we were not worth knowing anymore.
Full disclosure: I have done this to others, cut them off. Because they scared or drained me or asked too few questions or because I am an ass.
In each such friendship, a moment arrived for me and poof. Now those moments have come for others. I'm the cut-off one. Cue soft receding footsteps.
Like animals, friendships live or die. While they thrive — eyes bright, pulses throbbing — we seldom think: This is work or Behold this rare miracle. After a blowup or long silence, realizing that something once spontaneous has stalled, we notice strangers being kinder to us, or more curious, than our alleged friends.
Mutual fades just happen: a consensual forgetting like the slow corrosion that unhinges ships. Pals naturally grow apart. In one-way fades, however, one pal believes all is well while being axed.
For a while, the axed pal — for instance, I — keeps sending smiley texts which glow eternally unopened, grotesque in their innocence.
For a while, we might think Friend A is busy or (oh no!) in crisis. We think: Friend A needs me! Poor Friend A! Sometimes this is totally true. But sometimes we watch Friend A chatting blithely with others online, posting pictures of pie.
Suspicion dawning, we might dispatch a desperate depth-charge — typing, or hallooing down a voicemail hole, Hello? Is everything OK?
We barely recognize our voices then. It feels like hearing ourselves trying to speak foreign languages.
And when even the depth-charge goes unrecognized, we know we have been ghosted. Wiped. Erased.
We are now one about whom it has been decided to no longer care. To be decreed no-longer-mattering.
This fact now floods me with acidic shame and fear, as if my whole body was one big blister.
I have inflicted this exact suffering on others, twice regretting it too late.
Once cut off, those of us with sub-stellar self-esteem blame ourselves. We ask not What happened? but What did I do wrong? because this is how we were raised to think. Some of us were told frequently when young, You made God mad.
Yes, we realize that much wreckage we wreak is unintentional. We might call ourselves stupid, selfish, oafish but not cruel because, in our eyes, cruelty is a luxury requiring confidence.
When friends deep-six us, we wonder how, when and where we hurt them. Did we applaud their triumphs too flaccidly? Are we bad listeners? Did we become too sad?
I have no magic strategies except to say that being cut off merits mourning. We were parts of things that died. But can we at least grant ourselves the kindness of not calling it our fault?
Sometimes we are cut off because of other things that happened to us, not by choice. Changes in mood, view, status, states of health.
Also, friends change: severing ties to certain sections of their pasts, for instance. Or suddenly caring only about archery or moss.
The fault or failure is often no more ours than theirs — or that of space, time, chemistry. We failed to sustain their affection. They failed to keep liking us.
