Living through the art of losing

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

When do you get to the point in your friendship when you know it’s over? By "over," I don’t necessarily mean a turbulent silence occurring after some sort of emotional warfare. Over the years, I’ve learned that there are many ways a friendship can end. There are times it can end with a thunderous reckoning; other times, it’s much quieter. In time, you will start to feel you’ve moved on, but losing a dear friend never leaves you completely unscathed. Most of the time – when it means something – you fight till the bitter end and hang on for dear life to save a friendship. Sometimes the fight alone can keep you going. However, it’s when you finally give up and let go that it hurts to the core.

What makes a friendship worth fighting for? I’m sure there are thousands of reasons – knowing each other since childhood, sharing momentous experiences, keeping dark secrets, forgetting the past, fighting for a cause – the list is endless. I recently lost a friend to betrayal. By betrayal, I don’t mean the sordid love triangles that fuel so many tired daytime soaps. See, when a man comes between two friends, betrayal is a momentary hiccup that can be cured with a tall drink of water. I’m talking about the kind that terminates a friendship. The common misconception about betrayal is that it exists in a single form. Nothing could be further from the truth. How could a single deed unravel every fiber of a friendship unless it can secretly manifest itself in so many different manners? That’s why it hurts so much – because betrayal happens in secret, because it begins easily, in a friend or loved one’s secret place, until it takes you by surprise and ends your friendship.

* * *

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

What is it about betrayal that makes it so easy? In contemporary society, it seems that the meaning of friendship has mutated into a transient experience, a commodity defined by its entertainment value and quantified only by a specific number of favors. These days, it can be hard to tell who your real friends are. But no matter how cynical you get over the years, it never gets easier to lose a friend.

I thought I was used to saying goodbye. By the time I graduated from college, I was certain that I had mastered the art of losing friends. In a small school with a low retention rate for students, it takes a lot of emotional stability to make friends and build lasting relationships with them, especially in a small college community. People left school for all sorts of reasons, whether it was because they decided to transfer to a better college, because they couldn’t afford the tuition anymore, because they flunked out, because they graduated – eventually someone always left.

So many of my good friends in college left. Each of them had their own reasons for doing so, but that didn’t matter. Not as much as the fact that I said goodbye to people who comprised a significant part of the person I am today. It sounds melodramatic, but it’s not like my friends moved across the street or over to the next town. They went home, to America, Dubai, Ecuador, Bosnia, Croatia, or to whatever country accommodated their plans for the future.

It hurts to miss them, because I know the reality of the situation is that I may never see some of them again, and if I do, we may never be as close as we were in college.

* * *

Then practice losing further, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I remember the day I lost a friend who had meant so much to me before. I had known her since my first semester at college. In fact, she was my first good friend in college. We grew close because of a shared disdain for our literature class, a mutual obsession with making lists and an insatiable need to live life out loud. We played dress-up (she was Holly Golightly and I was Siouxsie Sioux), put on fake accents and went clubbing in character.

I cooked her adobo and brought over facemasks and a manicure kit when she didn’t feel well. She flirted with my neighbor so he could lend us a selection of his very cool DVDs for our movie nights. We were so close, even if it was only for a few months.

She left Switzerland for a school in America. The only thing I remember about saying goodbye is that she said she would never meet anyone like me. We parted ways as if we’d see each other the next day. Despite all the different ways technology allowed us to stay in touch, it became harder and harder for me to do so. It might have been because the emotions I would normally impart over coffee and a pack of Galuoises had to be tailored to fit an e-mail written between classes.

Over time, the e-mails I received every other week trickled to occasional, unexpected updates on her contact information. Then we just lost touch completely. We hadn’t spoken for two years when I learned that she had passed away. I had lost many friends before, but that was by far the hardest to bear. Now I can only remember the little things, and even so, my memories are hazy. I didn’t even feel we had lost our friendship until I lost my friend forever.

* * *

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I missed them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Shortly after that, I lost a part of my life. It was my turn to graduate from college, fill my bags with fragments of my second home and return to the one I left behind. I kissed the people who had become my family and left them all to live the life of an adult. I thought it would be easy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think about those friends every single day. And although we try our best to stay in touch, it isn’t quite the same.

When it comes to real life, everyone’s a loser at one point or another. Things can’t help but change and loss is an inevitable reality for everyone. I’m still learning to cope with the fact that many friends can no longer be a part of my life the way they used to be.

It’s true, no matter how many friends you lose – even in this age of fleeting relationships–it never gets easier. What I have learned, however, is that losing someone is never in vain if you have something good to take from the experience. I may have grieved for the loss of many friendships and mourned for memories I cannot go back to, but now I know that nothing can ever unravel completely if you leave enough room for hope. What I’ve taken away from each loss in the end has helped me grow. It sounds cheesy, but with a bit of luck, the good will eventually make the bad seem like just another bump in the road. Maybe by then, I’ll be on a Vespa.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

* * *

The verses above are from the poem "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop. Wisdom and wisecracks are always welcome at whippersnappergirl@hotmail.com.