Breaking Up with A Long Time Friend

Breaking up with a long time friend isn’t easy. Nostalgia manages to creep up cradling the perfect memory. The one where your cheeks cramped from smiling too much, and things looked free and light on the surface yet in retrospect you also remember investigating the new frown line forming in between your eyebrows… You ask yourself when did that start? 

This long time friend seems innocuous. Gentle. Just there for a good time. Yet the underbelly is vicious, with long claws filed into harpoons and clammy nervous skin that suffocates you once you get too close. Somehow this friend manages to trick you, make you believe that this discomfort is normal, everyone feels this way. You just have to live with it. 

Recently on an overnight hiking trip, I somehow managed to break up with this old friend. Hopefully for good this time. With every step towards the 3200m peak, I somehow managed to leave this friend further and further behind until they were just an inconspicuous dot on the horizon. 

Being in the mountains had always come with a duality. On one hand there was awe and this sublime feeling of adventure and challenge, and on the other the amalgamation of self-doubt and comparison that were the thieves of joy. 

During the hike, with every determined inhale and sometimes laboured exhale this unfriendly combination lost its grasp. My step was lighter (probably because I finally allowed myself to become fitter rather than skinnier), my thoughts less polluted with questions of what others were thinking of me or whether I was going too fast or too slow, and whenever I reached up to wipe sweat or smear sunscreen on my face the frown line wasn’t there. 

Breaking up with this long time friend isn’t easy. There was a lot of daily work- conscious or behind the scenes -  over years, YEARS, that went into this rupture. Frustration helped a lot too, making me realize that I’m tired of carrying and nourishing this monstrous friend. It may have started out just trying to keep me safe, to spare my feelings of judgment or rejection from peers or people I looked up to. I still see this friend around sometimes, it’s claws gripping into someone on the street or someone I meet, and I can understand the struggle. It’s hard to break up with a long time friend.