We Used To Be Friends

I went to the ER Sunday after a weekend spent in pain. I was supposed to have Mini-Me for that whole weekend. I only got to see her for a few hours during her brother's birthday party. At least my parents were able to help you get a break on Saturday. I think that you didn't believe I was sick until you saw me on Sunday. Or you didn't care. Help was offered as I left the party to drive myself to the ER, since my new partner, who has yet to get a spiffy pseudonym, was out of town, but I felt the politeness of it. Today when I went to pick up Mini-Me after my follow-up doctor's appointment, you didn't ask how I was feeling or what had been wrong with me. 

We used to be friends. I thought we still might be. I'm sure if I asked you, you'd say that is how it goes when you aren't living together anymore and that I'm not around anymore. To other people, I'm sure it has much to do with me dropping the ball with the parenting in the past few months, as we truly cut the romantic ties and moved into separate spaces. When things became more difficult on me, I broke and wasn't able to step up to the plate like I had planned. I have a feeling you feel like I chose a new partner over my kid(s), over the family we had. I know that I fucked up several times by not being where I was supposed to when I was supposed to. I know that for you and yours the why of that doesn't really matter, just that I didn't. 

But weirdly I hadn't thought it would make us not be friends, make us not care about the other. None of those things that we had in common went away. But you barely answer my texts. I don't hear about the kids, much less your life, not even when I ask. I guess that is what I deserve. My abdication made being a parent a bigger part of your identity than it now is of mine. It also burnt up any shred of care you still had for me. I tend to do that. Burn up that caring with need, even if it is a need I have created by my absence. 

Maybe we were never friends. Maybe we were lovers and then parents and we created what looked like friendship to fill the spaces. I had thought she was my friend too. Until I burned up her care and we realized how little we truly had in common. The more time spent apart though, the more I am unsure why I want to be friends except that ...well, I do that with exes. I feel this need to try to salvage the friendship we had, or that I thought we had, because I make my partner my bestfriend, in a world where I have very few friends to start with, so I don't want to lose that. But maybe your partner never really was your friend. Maybe when you operate the way I do, they are a different third category, the lover-friend? Lend? Frover? Maybe once one is gone, the other goes with it.

Honestly, I don't even know why i want you to care. Because that's really it. I want you to care. Just like I wanted you to care then. Like I wanted her to care. Care in a way that made sense in my head at least, which I've learned is the real trick. If you didn't then, why would you now? Why do I want you to? Why do I still care at all? 

And yet I go to bed tonight wishing I could have that easy conversation with you, sharing about parts of our lives or our minds or the world. Not because I want that romance back or the sex back. But just to have an exchange of a few messages with someone who is like-minded on the topic, or at least knows it. At this point in things, isn't that what friendship is? Or a significant portion of it for us? But that seems gone and I don't even know how to ask about getting it back. I think the answer is either that we were never friends or to go back in time and be someone else then and someone else now.