Seriously. I Have No Clue. About Anything.

I have this friend from college with whom I’m still very close.

The thing is, I have a hard time remembering, sometimes, why I’m friends with her in the first place.

We don’t see each other very often because we live in different cities, so our friendship is really a series of phone conversations that end with the requisite, “We really have to get together soon.”

Lately, these sporadic conversations are exhausting me because I’m not very good at pretending to be interested in someone.  It’s an actual physical struggle for me to pretend to be interested in someone who now simply annoys the hell out of me.

My friend has always been brash and outspoken.  I’ve always liked that about her.  She says what’s on her mind and sort of lets the chips fall where they may.  But, in recent years, this brashness has steadily degenerated to rudeness and a general disregard for remotely appropriate social behavior.

Truly, I prefer unfiltered honesty of emotions in my friends because I’d much rather have an honest friend than a nice one.  But, these days, the stuff that my friend says reflects a general ignorance, meanness and unchecked cruelty towards others and even herself.

Obviously, not towards me.  One thing I can say about this friend is that she treats me with a great deal of respect, love and loyalty.  This, I think, lies at the heart of why I could never just ignore her until she went away. It would be a hurtful act on my part, particularly because she hasn’t been hurtful to me.

I can’t say, “You have bad manners, so I don’t want to associate with you, anymore” because, frankly, it would make me feel like a total jerk.  Still, all this doesn’t adequately offset the general discomfort I feel when I’m talking to her or when I’m around her.

For example, my husband and I went to dinner with her and her fiance, who we’ve met only once before, about three or four months ago.  In the middle of the dinner, she looked at me and said, “Faiqa, ask him (her fiance) why he hasn’t set a date (I assumed she meant for their marriage), yet.”

Me: (Nervous laugh) Umm.  No.  I think that’s something you should probably talk about at home.  Wow, these burritos look really good.

My Friend: O.K., Tariq, you ask him.

Me: Don‘t (kick to husband’s leg under the table) these (kick harder) burritos (kick, kick) look good (kick), honey?

Tariq:  (Big smile)  So, man.  Why haven’t you set a date, yet?  Ouch, why do you keep kicking me?!!

Come on, we barely know this guy.  And when asked this question by my endearingly simple husband, the fiance replies, “I…I don’t know.  You have the ring, don’t you?  Isn’t that enough for right now?”

O.M.G. I am not your therapist.

I don’t want to help you guys work through whether or not your fiance’s a commitment phobe or not.  Or worse, have him admit over Mexican food that he just asked you to marry him because he wanted you to shut the hell up about it.

Silence ensued after his curt response.

And, then?

Then, she actually started arguing with him.  In the restaurant.  With us at the table!! She said, “We’re not leaving here until you set a date” and continued to harangue him for what seemed like an eternity.

My husband and I sat there staring at the smear of sour cream on top of our respective burritos as though they contained the answers to all of life’s most perplexing mysteries.  ( I think I just saw Jesus!) I also had to kick Tariq several more times to remind him that he should at least try to make his snickering inaudible to human ears.

The icing on the cake, the proverbial cherry on top of this story?  When the waitress came to ask if we needed anything, my friend turned to her and says, loudly, “Don’t you think I’m a nice enough girl and deserve to know what day I’m getting married?”

To the waitress. That we don’t know. It was really awkward.  I hate awkward.  It just makes you feel so… awkward.  By the way, the waitress negotiated a June wedding for which we tipped her extra.

Every encounter in the past few years has smacked of this uneasiness and awkwardness.

But, these complaints aren’t situations that have “hurt” me.  They aren’t indicators that my friend is a bad person, if there is such a thing.  She just doesn’t have the same sense of decorum as I do.  Again, I just don’t feel like that’s a good enough reason to break off a decade and a half of friendship.  So, in a tactic completely uncharacteristic of me, I’ve just tried to dodge any prolonged conversations or friendly outings with her.

Finally, day before yesterday, the whole “we’ve got to get together soon” stall tactic fell flat on its face.  She insisted that she wanted to come over and see me because it had been way too long.  I couldn’t think of a legitimate excuse to say no, so I said, “That would be great!”

When she walked into my house, I noticed she looked different.  She acted different, too, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  We sat on my couch for a while, she commented on how big my daughter was getting and, then, she told me something else.

“I wanted you to know,” she said, “that I joined A.A. and that I’ve been sober for two months now.”

“Really.” I said, as I stared silently at her face.  Experience has taught me, in these situations, it’s just best to keep your mouth shut and let people tell you what’s going on instead of saying something really stupid.

But, here’s a little snippet from my internal dialogue:  WHAT? A.A.?  You mean, Alcoholics Anonymous?  Isn’t that for, well, alcoholics?”

She explained to me that for the past five or six years, she’s been struggling with alcohol.  She said that, in the past year, it had gotten to the point that the only time she didn’t drink was when she was at work.  And, that, on her days off, she would start drinking as soon as she woke up in the morning.  She was going through several bottles of wine a day.

I believed her, totally and completely.  All those times we were on the phone, I had thought she was crazy, neurotic and mean, but it turns out that she was just … drunk.

I remembered a phone call from her that I once got in the middle of the afternoon.  She had called to congratulate me for not having an abortion when I found out I was pregnant.  (She’s Pro Life, and just so you know, I was happily married when I got pregnant and, obviously, with my own husband‘s baby, so this comment was very, very, very out of context).

I had laughed it off at the time.  After I hung up, I rolled my eyes, and thought, at what point in our relationship did this woman become a raving lunatic?

I remembered the last fifteen minutes of the famed “set a date” dinner outing, too.  We were standing outside the restaurant when, suddenly, she announced that she had to use the restroom.  I, of course, went back inside with her.  I didn’t think about how odd it was that she had ordered a shot of tequila from the bar while I was in the bathroom, even though she had downed two margaritas while we were eating.  Maybe she feels like drinking a lot today, I had thought.  I didn’t realize that she had probably finished off two bottles of wine before we had even gotten there.  She wasn’t rude and oblivious.  She was intoxicated.

I listened to her as she explained how alcoholism is a disease.  She told me about her steps to recovery, how she was lucky she never really hit rock bottom, that she had been struggling with admitting this for several years, now.  She assured me that she felt better now than she had ever felt in her life, and how she just planned to be sober twenty four hours at a time.

I realized during that conversation that, for the past few years, the person I didn’t like was not my friend, after all.  It was her alcoholism, I suppose, that was being mean, inappropriate or rude. I breathed a sigh of relief.  I don’t think I could ever come up with a more compelling argument for being a coward than this one.  If I had stopped talking to her, I wouldn’t have been able to sit with her that day.  I wouldn’t have had the privilege of learning that despite all of our flaws, messiness and weaknesses, we human beings have been blessed with the magnificent ability to self correct.

Finally, as I sat with her on my sofa, I began to remember the woman that I had become friends with in the beginning.

The friend that was brave, loyal, smart, outgoing, honest, beautiful, articulate, hard working, supportive, funny, creative, and, just plain amazing. The friend who is my friend not because she loves me, but because I love her. I don’t know anything about alcoholism.  I have no clue.  I don’t know what’s in store for her, or even if there’s anything I can do to help her.

Right now, I’m just going to hold on to the vision of who she really is, of the person I know, and try not to ever forget that again.