Prompt 24: A Letter to Someone who has Hurt Me Recently

Sorry, this ended up being kind of intense... :-/

Dear friend,

I ran into you the other day.  I hadn't seen you in a couple years, since before you had your baby.  I was excited to meet him and to see you.  I smiled at you and your spouse and crouched down to see your lovely little boy.  I'm so glad I got to meet him in person.

But when I stood back up I noticed that you weren't really smiling.  Not a real smile.  I know because we used to be best friends and I was very good at making you smile.  I tried to start a conversation but you only replied with one-word answers.  Your spouse and I chatted easily, but you stood there in silence.

You're married now, so it makes sense we wouldn't be as close as we used to be.  But I know that we were growing apart long before you ever met your spouse and that a large part of that was my fault and it hurt your feelings.  I'm so sorry about that and I've been trying to make it up to you for years now.  It was something I needed to do and I wish I'd known how to do it more gracefully, or at least how to tell you what I was doing.

But I thought that maybe you had forgiven me for that.  You invited me to your parents' house for your wedding.  You were almost like the old you.  You invited me to dinner with you and your spouse and brother and again, you were friendly and I thought maybe we were, if not the friends we once were (there was a reason that had to end) at least friends who remembered that we used to be inseparable.  Friends who were ok with the fact that we couldn't maintain the relationship we'd had in college, but would always care about each other.

But when I saw you standing there, acting polite of all things, I knew that I was another victim of that selective memory I had witnessed so many times.  The memory that turned exes you had thought about marrying into random people you'd hung out with a couple of times but were never really serious with.  I saw that our relationship had met the same fate.  We weren't dear, close friends...I was just someone who you'd known a few years back.

And that hurt me.  You hurt me.  Your polite fake-smile and your one word sentences.

That's why I left so quickly.  I didn't want to force you to keep being polite, but much more I didn't want to keep listening to you as you told me that you, someone I will always care about so much, no longer cared about me.

sincerely,

me