Originally published April 15, 2013
This past weekend, I had the privilege of restarting an old friendship I thought had died some years ago. It was a weird, rocky friendship to begin with, and it seemed to take care of itself as time passed. Truth is, sentiment dies hard with me, and recent life events compelled me to reach out anyway. Last night, we exchanged a few e-mails (about 50) since neither of us seemed to be able to log into chat at the same time as the other. (Typical of our relationship; we never seemed to be in sync with each other.)
By the end of our electronic dialogue last night, I had felt the inevitable toll of sparking up a friendship that may well have been doomed from the start: the burden of unloading – ironically – the emotional baggage that had smothered the flames of friendship. Any benefits associated with these reconnection costs? Well, she’s now out of my current book project, and she may be inspired to do something I’ve urged her to do when we were still on speaking terms: to write her own story at long last. In that way, re-upping our twisted liaison wasn’t all bad