On November 21st, 2017, my friend Clara (not her real name) invited me over to her house and cooked me dinner. We caught up about our lives, drank boozy bevs, and laughed a lot. Everything between us was as normal as could be: no lingering tensions about the many conflicts we’d been through together in our ten years of friendship, which kicked off in a fateful tenth-grade math class. At the end of the night, I thanked her for the meal, told her to sleep well, and headed home. I had no idea that I would never see her again, at least not in the context of her being my friend.
See, over the next few months, Clara first got distant and then completely ghosted me. This was not uncommon for her: spells of bad mental health sometimes rendered her unable or unwilling to answer texts for months at a time. Her last text to me – on January 7th, 2018 – was a picture of a book called Priestdaddy, snapped in a bookstore at the mall. “This immediately made me think of you,” she wrote – and then never texted me again.
In March, I wrote, “Hey friend, I miss you! Wanna hang soon?” No answer.
In April, I wrote, “I’m playing a show at the Social Capital Theatre on Friday if you feel like having a fun night out. I miss you, friend.” No answer.