I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY

I don’t know why you keep going in and out of my life. Sometimes years pass. Sometimes it’s only months. Somehow we always seem to find our way back to each other just long enough to remind me why losing you hurt in the first place.

I miss you and resent you in equal measure, sometimes in the same breath, and I can’t quite make sense of either feeling.

I know I’m not innocent here. Confrontation makes me want to disappear, and I’ve gotten disturbingly good at it. But this letter isn’t about who was right and who was wrong — I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for that accounting, and frankly, I don’t think it matters anymore.

For a long time I felt like you were the star of our friendship and I was just caught in your orbit. An asteroid pulled in by gravity, content to orbit until it forgot it had its own trajectory. You had this enormous personality — magnetic, extroverted, filling every room — and I was your adopted introvert, swept along for the ride. For a long time, that worked. And then somewhere along the way I realized I’d been tending to your world while quietly abandoning my own. Somewhere along the way, I got so good at showing up for you that I forgot how to show up for myself. That’s not an accusation. I didn’t know how to hold my ground or ask for what I needed. That part’s on me.

But this letter isn’t about fault.

It’s about the glance across a crowded room. We had an entire language made of eye rolls, raised eyebrows, and the slightest tilt of a head. Half the conversations that mattered happened before either of us opened our mouths. The way we could lock eyes over someone completely unhinged and already know — without a single word — that we were thinking the exact same thing. And then later, alone, we’d actually talk about it and laugh because we’d both caught every detail. That kind of shorthand takes years to build. You can’t fake it and you can’t replace it.

This is half an ode to a friendship that shaped me and half something I never quite found the words for.