Article and Art by Chloë Fontenelle
Dear,
How have you been? We haven’t talked in years now, although we still have each other’s numbers and follow each other on Instagram. How do you remember us? At this point, I’ll probably never know, but here’s how I remember it:
We became close in eighth grade, seated together randomly in humanities class. We’d known each other for years, just like we’d known everyone in our grade for years. We’d even attended each others’ birthday parties, but we had never really clicked. We were both thirteen, in between friend groups somewhat, and so miserable. The first few months were light, fun— the magic of discovering a new person, discovering yourself through a new person, our dynamic intense but still uncomplicated.
Then, your father died. Before that, I had been the only child in our grade with a single mother, with no father on the scene. He died suddenly when I was six, and we moved right after. It wasn’t something I thought that I was particularly secretive about, but I never volunteered this information either. People who had known me for years would ask casually what my father did, why they had never met him before, and I would be cornered.
I would try to tell them as casually as I could, try to match their tone, and yet I would already be bracing myself for their stricken expressions, for the inevitable awkwardness, for the guilt. I would feel like crying and laughing and would be terrified that I would do either. How hadn’t they known earlier? (Why hadn’t I told them, made it more public knowledge to maybe avoid this exchange altogether?) In a town that small, you expect to know everything about everyone. How could I explain that all I wanted at that age was to blend in as much as possible, be exactly like everyone else. I would say anything, or say nothing at all, to accomplish this.
You never had that option. Your father died suddenly in the middle of the school year, and everything was going to be different forever, and I didn’t feel like I knew how to help you, or the right thing to say, the right thing to do. Maybe it hardly mattered; we were both fatherless girls in a sea of respectable nuclear families and maybe the only thing I could do then was be there. And we were so deeply enmeshed at that point, us plus another friend, inseparable as a trio in a way that’s maybe only possible when you are fourteen and things are falling apart.
And I don’t think any of us knew what to do for each other at that point, and things were rocky and painful, too, but I was so, so happy to have the both of you. Looking back now, some of the ways we tried to care for each other seem misguided, but I guess we didn’t know what else to do. We loved each other, of course, but didn’t always know how to help each other. This is the only way I knew how to be there for you. To listen. To pay attention.
I felt like I could understand you so well, even when the things you said or did didn’t make much sense on the surface. A boy new to the school asked about your father years after it happened, and you said he was away right now. And I understood exactly why you did that, even if you risked him finding out later on, asking awkward questions.
You would tell me often that our friendship was too one-sided, that you wished I would come to you with things, not just play therapist. I didn’t know what to do about this. I was so ashamed of everything about myself and didn’t know what to do about that either. And in so many ways we were so similar— our anxieties, our eating disorders, our shame, our grief. You talked all the time about how well I could read you, that I would seem to know about things before you even said them out loud. You took it as evidence that I knew you so well, and maybe I did, but I think it was often just that I knew myself.
In many ways, especially the most painful ones, we were so similar, and yet I didn’t know how to express this to you. I think I always hoped you could intuit these similarities yourself, just “know” somehow, but this is a ridiculous thing to ask of someone. When you would talk about the one-sidedness of our dynamic, I was inclined to agree, but felt that I was actually at the advantage. We could be so close, and you could tell me everything and I could listen, and in turn, I could reveal nothing to you and stay safe. As the years passed, it felt to me that we were so ingrained in this routine that change was impossible. I didn’t have the words to express this to you either.
As a trio, we stayed so close for the first half of high school, and then things got darker. I don’t know how to talk about some of it even now. Through it all we had the roles we would fill for each other, taking turns playing best friend, concerned parent, free therapist, closest confidant, life coach, even critic and competitor. Our other friend would usually take the hard stance, telling us what we should do about all of our problems, while I would play mediator.
As we became increasingly comfortable in these roles, they shaped our group dynamic as three. You and I became closer, maybe a bit at the expense of our third friend, who believed she knew how we should act, and what we should change to fix our lives. It got to the point that our third friend confessed to me once that she knew that if I couldn’t come to a sleepover, it wouldn’t happen at all, that you would bail. She had always wanted to be closer to you, I think, and you favored me, and she resented me for it.
I wasn’t really shocked, then, when you told me that you liked me at the end of our freshman year. You had always told me how much you loved me, expressed it in that intense, over-exaggerated way that close friends do at that age, but something intangible had shifted between us a few weeks earlier. I had sensed it and wasn’t sure what to think about it. But then you confessed to me with such an aura of impending doom, like you already knew what I was going to say before I said it.
Of course I rejected you. What else could I do? I would tell myself I was straight for two more years after that point, and tell everyone else I was straight for at least two more years after that. I couldn’t say any of this to you at the time, so you assumed I was straight and I did nothing to disabuse you of this notion. I loved you, with the nebulous, undefinable intensity of a relationship of that kind. But I felt that there was nothing else I could do.
Besides, from the second I started to think about it I was convinced that dating would be bad for us, and would have wrecked one of the only stable friendships we both had at that time. Even now I stand by this. Getting together would have ended badly for us. After all, even just acknowledging the mere possibility changed the dynamics of our relationship fundamentally.
And I wanted to leave our school, our hometown, so badly— I think all of our friends did, at least a little bit. And I worked hard at getting out of there and told nobody, not even you. And I did all the work, and then I got an opportunity, a really, really great opportunity, to leave for our whole junior year.
And some of my friends were upset about it when I told them, sprung it on them suddenly towards the end of our sophomore spring, but you acted happy, saying how great it was that I was getting out. And I didn’t really believe you, and would have understood if you were angry at me, but we both knew it would change nothing. I was leaving anyway.
And we were friends again, of course we were still friends, with the onset of senior year, but we had drifted. Junior year had been hard for everyone in different ways, and I had left, and we were both different people, sort of. And we had so little time left here. We were still friends, part of a larger group, but you felt so far away from me now. I was vaguely aware that we had lost something, and I wanted to find it again, but I wasn’t sure how.
Senior year pre-Covid was a blur, but I remember you wrote me a letter— you used to do things like that a lot. I don’t remember what it said exactly, just that it was beautiful, and very like you. I’m sure I meant to put it somewhere for safekeeping, but I haven’t seen it since. Could’ve been anywhere, tucked in a chemistry notebook or crumpled at the bottom of a backpack. Looking back, I could kick myself. How could I just lose something like that? How could I forget every word of it?
If you ever want to write me another letter, or text me, or call, or even smile whenever we pretend not to see each other in the grocery store during breaks, you know where to find me. Or maybe I’ll reach out first, for once. The phone goes both ways.
Love.