It keeps you linked to people who would naturally pass off and be forgotten with time, or mostly. But now, you remain eternally acquainted whether you want to or not, and you continue to be aware of intimate aspects of their lives despite not really being friends.
I still talk to my tweenhood best friend, someone I never would have talked to again after our "final" adult falling out. Yet there she is. It's impossible to relate to her now, and I can tell she feels the same way, but we still kind of try.
We became friends in middle school, which lasted through high school and the first few years after. As kids, we were impossibly close, having created a siblinglike relationship in which we would talk for hours, paint each others' nails and go to the mall incessantly. That may sound basic, but we were goth so it's fine. She was outgoing and I was introverted and we jealously disliked each others' friends once we started going to separate high schools. Ending our summer that year and starting high school in different places felt like a big loss, or a breakup. We were both so trepidatious of what was to come.
Her mom was a Texan southern belle, all big hair and short skirts, tottering around in tall heels and tons of makeup. She was the opposite of my frazzled workaday mom, who had no capacity for frippery or meaningless dates with spray-tanned men. An intensely self-centered person, Jessica's mom would drive us around if it suited her, and I remember she almost got into a car accident once because she kept raising the backs of her hands up from the steering wheel to look at her rings, admiring how well they went with her long red nails. Her mom could never understand why (at 13), we two girls would only hang out with each other and never with boys. We used to ride together in the back seat of her Honda Civic when she drove us to the mall, and one day she pulled into a spot and craned around to us asking, out of the blue, "Are y'all gay?" Except it sounded like, "Are Y'ALL GAY!!!!?" Drawl in full effect. Jessica and I looked at each other and back at her and at each other again. "No?!?" we cried in unison. (not that it's a bad thing!)
Jessica and I went on to live together after high school. My dad had already met his current witch friend, and upon moving in with her, allowed me to take over his cute little ranch style on 10th Ave with all of the furniture intact, charging only the cost of utilities. I moved Jessica in, and our relationship instantly changed. She was never able to make "rent," which was probably like $200 each, and was forever pissing me off by bringing home random animals and men, never caring that I had to answer to my dad about the state of the house because he was liable to drive by or pop in at any time. He wasn't much of a jerk about it, but needless to say he didn't like that she brought everything from ferrets to the guy who worked at the gas station home, and those are just the ones he found out about. Eventually we were robbed, but the burglar somehow seemed to know to beeline to Jessica's room and steal her not insignificant weed stash. I kicked her out soon after, and she's ready to litigate that to this day. We don't talk about it.
I was a pretty straitlaced kid back then, and it was only during those days with Jessica that I first tried smoking weed. It broke my brain and I used to sit in my bedroom, swearing I could hear people talking and radios playing when the house was quiet and empty. My dad thought (thinks) the house is haunted and used to tell me, "Don't use substances here! It makes you vulnerable to spirits!"
Christ. But maybe it did. After I kicked Jessica out, I used to lay in bed alone in the house at night, freaking out about the 50 year old windows that trembled in the wind and how easy it would be for someone to get into the house. I had nightmares all the time and used to wake up at 2 AM, scared out of my mind after fighting with ghosts and demons in my dreams, and drive across town to my boyfriend's house to get away. I'd back out of the driveway consciously refusing to look ahead, frightened that I'd see a gaunt face watching me from between the blinds at the big bay window. I told that story to my dad years later and he said, "And you're still skeptical? Have you ever acted like that in any other place where you've lived?" Well, no. I can remember every supernatural nightmare I've had since then on one hand.
We still regret that he sold the house, both he and I, not least because it's probably worth three times what it sold for in 2004. The one thing he and I can agree upon without reservation is that we both still think about, and dream about that house on a regular basis 15 years hence.
Speaking of never learning, Jessica and I moved in together about 6 years after I kicked her out of our house on 10th ave. This time we were in our mid 20s, living in a falling-down bungalow in the Maple-Ash neighborhood of Tempe. What a strange little house that was, painted and repainted, rented to broke kids for decades, ages, eternity. The front porch would have fallen down if you bumped into it. I just looked at it on Google street view and it's still the same. It looks like cold weather to me, because we only lived there in winter. Looks like the house is still a kid-shithole with a dresser on the front porch. I thought about driving by it when I passed through Tempe this year for what felt like the first time in decades and certainly the first time in seven years, University looking somehow the same and somehow impossibly different, but decided against it. What's to see. So many weird memories in that square mile area. What a fucking weird place and city and state.
But back then, I was forced into the role of motherly scold, chastising Jessica for the sink full of food-encrusted dishes or when I would wake up in the middle of the night to find strange men in our living room. Always someone different, always someone sketchy as hell. I would keep my cat in my room and lived in that tiny space almost exclusively after a while, to avoid. Also because she was known to leave the door open when she left for work. I may be persnickety about how I want my house to be, but that was a literal issue that left me wondering if she was trying to be awful. She still couldn't pay rent and we had to break our lease when she lost her job. I remembered all of this recently when I broke into an old Livejournal I kept during that period, in which I bitched about her incessantly, and aired our grievances to my strange group of internet and real friends.
Here's a sample. Shittiness preserved for honesty, Regrets include never capitalizing, which is sort of hard to understand now. I can't believe how many friends I used to share this kind of private stuff with. Anyway, from Feb 6, 2009:
MY ROOMMATE. LOST HER JOB.
i won't go into the 250 ways she has utterly fucked me just since november. i'm all talked out on this subject. i am both shocked and unsurprised by this, though, as i have been awaiting her latest shenanigan more and more each day. it's been almost two weeks since the last. that would be a record amount of quiet time from her, but clearly she was just saving it up for something really spectacular.
she has no plan. she has no savings. she has no severance package. she is in debt. she has not paid me for the last 2-3 various bills. i have very little cushion to support "us" (UGH THERE IS NO US) against this due to having covered 70% of her bills for 2.5 months. it's a strange place to be in, as i both do this without hesitation owing to the fact that all utilities are open on my credit, and without excessive anger or freakouts, both because i expect it and because i now have anxiety anyway and won't stop once i let myself start. so i feel quite like a doormat. a doormat who has to cover herself by supporting the dirtbaggiest, most irresponsible fool ever.
so i'm hiring ken volk to break my lease, and i am counting the moments until i can eject this malignancy from my life forever. i get frantic emails from her about how she wished she could tell me face to face, at which i scoff, and how she "loves" me and so on and so forth. what is with this shifty stupid obsession with DIRECT COMMUNIQUE. how direct is it that i get a phone call at work 48 hours after an event has gone down informing me that there is SRS BUSINESS to conduct and don't get mad, but that she does not want to discuss it until we are together in approximately six hours. i don't accept this. that forewarning. absurd! additionally, i am not concerned with someone's approach, tone or buildup. i'm concerned with the facts. "i wish i could have told you in person," she says. biiiiiiitch i would conduct all of our interactions via txt msg if only i could.
so anyway. it's all very problematic, but ridding my life of her in a permanent manner in a much shorter amount of time than i was expecting (march 1!) is so relieving that i almost don't mind at all.
Regarding the writing, there are so many early tells in there that I'd never do now. The words "shenanigan" and "dirtbag" were heavily in my rotation back then. There are a lot of really specific numbers in here, too. Unnecessary.
And yikes! in general. But she was actively ruining my life at the time, and this isn't shit when it comes to a bad review from me. I feel for that girl back then, and I don't mean myself, I mean Jessica. She was so chaotic! She was used to it, but I wasn't. And while she was bitchy and defiant as hell then, I see now that she was in a strange pattern of disorder that doesn't reflect her true character, which does seem to crave stability. She was just too damned wild, and raised without a real center. I was definitely not able to be sympathetic about it then and I still wouldn't be if she were my roommate today, but I still feel kind of bad. Sorry, bro. We kind of hated each other for a while. If only our now-selves could send money back to our younger selves, for security when there was none. I wish I could go back to those days and TCB.
Ah youth. RIP, kidness ours.
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