damages = total loss

Captured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 2010

(35 mm f5, 1/80)

I'd like to think of myself as someone who is a good friend. I'm down-to-earth, thoughtful and loyal as a golden retriever (at least I think so). The friends I have have become my lifelong friends. For the most part, I've never really had drama in my friendships. I don't know if that's because I attract people who are easy to get along with, or if I just lucked out with the kindest and sweetest people to call my friends. Yet recently, I lost a good friend and it has felt as though I've had to grieve through the loss.

You see, this person K (names have been changed to protect the innocent ;) was a friend that I valued. Even though we hadn't been friends for too long, there was a familiarity and comfortableness in being around this person. Not too much had to be explained and we just understood each other (or so I thought). Yet things between us drastically changed. We went from playing for the same team to being opponents on the field. In a matter of days, the friend I thought I had known became a completely different person.

Without revealing too much, I can say this: the inherent problems in our friendship (unbeknownst to me) were left unspoken and I only found out about them after the damage was done. Although I did what I could in damage control (i.e. confront, apologize, try to move forward), it was of no use. Too many feelings had been hurt and too much time had passed to try to fix things now. In the end, K and I walked away from the scene with what was considered to be a total loss.

As I've had to see K occasionally, the obligatorily courteous "hello's" and "how's it going's" have left me feeling blue. As I constantly (and deleteriously) think over and over in my head about what I could have done differently, I realize that maybe it wasn't meant to be. But I'm still hopeful. Maybe one day, things between us will change.