rough sketches: Breaking Up With My Best Friend

Of all the differing social bonds we human beings develop no one is as perplexing or peculiar as the best friend. Acquaintances are easy. Those people you meet outside smoking or at parties and out of sheer desire to fill the emptiness start a conversation with. You never have to call them or write them emails. As the expression goes, you literally just see them around. Those are the kind of friendships that work best for me. Don’t get me wrong. I, like any other soul possessing bipedal I despise those “So what are you up to these days?” conversations. But after years of mindless socializing outside of scummy rock bars I know how to avoid them. I fancy myself pretty good at making small talk interesting. That is if I decide to talk at all. With these friends, there is no break-up phase. Eventually you just don’t see them around any more. Occasionally you might think about where they might have gone and inquire as to their whereabouts with other smoker buddies, but that’s about the extent of it.
Contrary to what the countless teen angst love ballads and perhaps even your own personal experience might tell you, ending a sexual relationship is also pretty easy. Sure it might hurt like hell, and sure it might feel like your heart is being rung out like a dishrag and sure you might actually contemplate never leaving your bed again, but at least these endings are well defined. You either hate her for the rest of your life or you lump her in with the other acquaintances, allowing her extended hugs and hesitated glances when you haven’t seen each other in while. At my age, I’ve done it enough and I know exactly how to deal with it. This is after all what traditionally comes to mind when we think of the word “break-up.”
I’ve ended best friendships before, but never like this one. There was Julie in kindergarten who I proceeded to talk about for about a week after I was put into French-emersion. Then there was Brendan whose dad got a job as the only gynecologist in some small town out west the summer before we were going into high school. Naturally, his dad had to take the job and my best friend with him. There was Jordan who I was a best friend for few pubescent months in grade school before deciding his obsession with stuffed animals wasn’t really my thing. I was more into action figures, and to prove it we had a real live fistfight in front of the whole class at recess. Those were the days. When friendships were simple and meaningless enough that they could be ended by physical violence. I had other best friendships that fell apart in the more obvious ways. Pete going to a different high school. Lane fucking my girlfriend and me not talking to either of them till this day. Drew and I simply drifting apart. That was the way they are supposed to end. That was natural. With Ryan, it was wholly synthetic.
He phoned me one day while I was on campus and asked if we could go for coffee. This in and of itself was unusual. Coffee was something we did with old girlfriends who wanted to catch up. In would have been more natural for him to suggest that we go catch a movie or go to my house and get stoned. In retrospect, I am glad I was completely sober for this conversation.
“Sure man. That sounds like fun,” I mumbled reluctantly, knowing that if I knew Ryan this was going to be anything but fun. Ryan wasn’t a homosexual, but he was, to say the very least, dramatic. Not that I am classifying the entire gay population as dramatic, or whinny, but it seemed to me that a predisposition towards pseudo masculinity that informed most of my male relationships was a deterrent against any conversation about the future of our friendship. Manly men – due at least in part to their reluctance to show any emotion – wouldn’t have the breaking up with your best friend moment I was about to experience.
After my last class, I met Ryan at the coffee shop. He had a coffee waiting for me – a sort of peace offering. It was black the way I liked it. “So man, what’s up?” I asked, breaking the thick cloud of unasserted tension. “You got any smokes? I lost my pack.”
“I quit.” Ryan was the kind of guy who loved smoking, a spokesperson for the coolness and jazz that preceded lung cancer. When we lived together, he used to sit there watching cartoons and chain smoke until the apartment air was blue. This annoyed me to no end. The cartoons I think more than the smoking. “Why don’t watch something productive?” I used to think to myself. “How is this stuff even funny? How is it even stimulating” Shows like the Simpsons and South Park I could get behind – they were after all brilliant satire. But he watched them all –Family Guy, American Dad, King of the Hill, Spung-Bob Squarepants. The poster child for a generation of pubescent adults hooked on bad toilet humour and obscure cultural references none of us understood. The worst part is he rarely laughed. It, like many of his other habits was depressing.
“Oh.” I said blankly. “Good for you. I guess now that you quit smoking and I don't get high anymore we don't have that much in common." Although it was obvious by the tone of my voice that I was kidding, this was a mistake. I was making things worse. He was avoiding eye contact. I had nothing. “So I’m reading this really cool article right now about how animals have sophisticated language, which is crazy because we used to think that language was the thing that separated us from animals….” I couldn’t remember the details. I was just filling dead air.
“That’s my problem with you,” he said, obviously unimpressed with my weak attempts at small talk, “all you ever talk about is what you are doing, what books you reading, what movies you’ve seen lately.” The outburst caught me off guard. He turned his head to look at me and gave one of those looks that contained a million different meanings. I envied the smaller, dumber, non-linguistic inclined species. For them life was simple. They didn’t have to explain to their immature friends why their friendship had eroded over the years. They didn’t have to explain anything to anybody.
“Jesus man, what’s with the hostility?” Ever since I’d got back from a summer of planting trees up north, Ryan had been pissed at me. I’d moved out of the apartment we had lived in together. I’d found some new people to hang out with – the kind of people who enjoyed listening to music and having conversations instead of playing endless hours of Xbox. It would be a stretch to say I was happier, but at least I felt like I was getting somewhere.
In my first few years of college I really liked Ryan. We had been friends in high school, part of a larger more homogeneous group of stoner kids who despised sports, jocks, who no longer rode our skateboards and spent most of our time smoking across the street. But after everyone else either moved away or didn’t continue on to university it was Ryan and I who seemed to have similar interests. We liked rock concerts, smoking pot, downloading porn, and going occasionally going to class. But after two years of coming home, getting stoned watching Ryan play online football matches in underwear, I was getting bored. He had no ambition. He wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to move on. I was beginning to sound like a needy girlfriend. But then again, he was the one breaking up with me.
After contemplating for a moment my rather canned response to his accusation, he said it. “I can’t do this anymore. We’re through.” For a moment my heart skipped a beat and I felt the corners of my eyes swell up. It was as if my body was concocting some sort of automatic response to those words, which many times in my life ruined me for months.
“Your breaking up with me?” I managed to choke out. I was in state of disbelieve. Not that we weren’t going to be best friends anymore – that fact had apparent to me for months – but that he was actually saying this out loud instead of letting our friendship take its natural course and die the usual slow, harmless death.
“If you call deleting our bff status on Facebook and taking you off of speed dial and never calling you about my girl shit or posting funny videos for you online, then yes I am breaking up with you.”
Whether or not such a Facebook application existed was a mystery to me, but I think I got the point. It was odd though. Unlike a normal break-up – the kind that are defined by heartache, and picture burning, and months of convincing yourself you still love her – our relationship was never defined. The word “love” was never an issue. We were best friends mainly because of circumstance and proximity. The only time we ever really admitted we were best friends was when Ryan was getting dumped and in a moment of sentimentality I told him “I here for you man. I mean common, I’m your best friend.” If this had been a relationship – if I had known beforehand that breaking-up was an option – I would have done it months ago.
He got up to walk away and I was left there alone with my black coffee. The last thing my best friend of two years would say to me was “I am breaking up you.” It was almost too perfect, too poetic. I was speechless. Mainly because with Ryan gone I had no one to talk to and sitting alone talking to myself in the coffee shop like a crazy person was no way to make a new best friend.