I Miss You and I’m Sorry
October 16, 2023
Author: Chloe Pehote
Editor: Chava Makman
“I know that things will never be the same as they are now”
Sometimes I still think about whether you have that wrinkled piece of printer paper with smeared ink in your desk drawer.
In the few months of summer before college, I wrote a handful of letters to some of the most important people in my life. Looking back, I cannot recall much from any of them. However, this blurb seems to still sit sour on my tongue two full years later.
Sometimes, I wonder if this fact is an ode to the ‘psychic’ jokes that we would make together; after all, we always swore that we could read each other’s minds. Or maybe it is just irony coming back to punch me in the face.
Knowing you, I doubt these memories even cross your mind nowadays. Did it even then? Did it sting when you read it? Does it now? Or does it give you peace knowing that maybe this is how it was always set up to be, like swallowing a lump in your throat instead of choking on it until it kills you?
I recently had a conversation with a friend of ours from high school about how you were doing. My response to her inquiry was curt. “Good,” I had said: cold, shameful, and numb. What I did not tell her was that the last time you had come home you screamed at me over my driving from my passenger seat; I cried. You laughed off a nonchalant apology with “it must be the military in me” as an excuse when I told you I did not have to pull over because of the car that nearly sideswiped me on the expressway as I had turned to excitedly tell you a part of a story from college. Rather, because the most emotion I had gotten out of you in two years had been you screaming at me for something so unbelievably insignificant. Tragically I confess, that is the last time I have seen you.
As time passes, you come home less and less. The girl I once would do anything for and everything with I now see at most twice a year, and more times than not our time together feels like a chore-a fulfillment of an expectation set sophomore year of high school for the sake of appearances and our own denial.
I hate this, and yet I could never hate you. I long for the life we shared together long before we were strangers to one another. I sit up at night, wondering how it is possible that you could go from knowing everything about my life to knowing absolutely nothing at all. It feels as though an actress has taken your place and I am desperately awaiting the return of the woman who knows the answers to all of my mysteries, let alone the names of my roommates. Despite the fact that you deny me the familiar intimacy of a best friend, I cannot allow myself to deny you the title itself. For this is not your fault, nor is it mine, but rather it is the forces of time, distance, and adulthood challenging us all at once.
I suppose there is comfort in the fact that I have yet to lose you entirely, and in knowing that this may just be the way of life. Despite the unfamiliarity in the details of who you are now, I take great pride in knowing you and admiring your successes from afar; I can only hope that you feel the same way. I could never pretend not to know you, only that maybe this is all in my head and there will come a day again of childlike pleasure and naivety.
Through this pain and longing you have taught me that the transition to adulthood involves inevitable heartache and longing for the youthful nostalgia for what used to be;I want you to know that I miss you and for that, I am sorry.
[The closing line of the letter to my best friend the summer before my freshman year of college]
