I'd Like to Report Some Missing People

I have a friend, actually I have several friends, who have become M.I.A. Sometimes it seems like I only actually have one friend left! It's really amazing when you go from hanging out with someone most of the time to never seeing them or talking to them and actually feeling like a pest when you try. It's like we broke up or something, but I've yet to receive closure.

I told a friend recently that I'm thinking of "consolidating" my friendships, meaning that I'm willing to let some friendships finally ebb into nothingness if need be. I don't want to do this. It just seems like some people have better things to do than call me back, or call at all. Perhaps they just have busier schedules than I do, yeah that's it, so they're just waiting to call me whenever they happen to have a spare moment.

The real deal though, is that I'm not the one doing the consolidating. I feel like they're whittling me out. So, I'm tired of fighting to save friendships that seemingly didn't mean as much to others as they did to me. It's not as cut-and-dry as I make it sound. These are friendships after all, not business deals. These are people who know about some of the worst hardships I've been through in the past few years. These are people with whom I've cried and laughed and fought and embraced.

The whole situation has really hurt me. I wake up in the morning with headaches and muscle tension from horrible, stressful dreams about fighting with them, being abandoned by them. I've been angered, saddened and left hollow by their absences. The worst part is it's not like it's several people from one group. They are a few different people in completely different areas of my life and they're all walking away. And I'm going to let them because it hurts too much to keep getting tossed in their wakes, it hurts to much to keep falling on my face while grasping for threads of reason. I can only take so much. I can only wonder so much if I'm that poor of a friend/person. I can only ask them and myself so many times if I've done something wrong. Sometimes the only thing left is to move on. Grasping at straws does no good when you're in the middle of the Pacific.