(SIX) Was I okay? I was not.

A few hours later, you texted me back.

OMG! Are you okay?

I was awash with relief. There you were, you were okay, everything was okay now. You had gone away for a day, the worst day, but now you were back. Thank god, thank god, I’d been so bewildered, I’d been overwrought. I’d been getting upset, though I hadn’t admitted it to myself, and I never would, not to you or me.

It didn’t matter that you’d left me a little bit hanging. All that mattered was that you were here.

I’m… My shaky hand hovered. I pictured you, post-holiday, lying on your family’s living room couch, phone in hand, your parents in and out of the room, the dog asleep nearby. A beverage sweating on a coaster in the acrid air conditioning. A remote. Tissues, maybe. The laptop handy. Finally out of Thanksgiving leftovers, eating fruit or something.

Was I okay? I was not. I was wrenched. I was wretched. My poor, sick mother, so lovely and hopeful in the picture I posted, the picture to which everybody responded, “She was beautiful,” which is I guess what you say on Facebook when someone’s loved one dies. Meanwhile, the first responders refused to retrieve her dead body from her house without hazmat suits.

I wanted to tell you. I wanted to talk to you on the phone and fall apart and hear you say soothing and sympathetic things. Like a mother would.

But here’s where it gets tricky, right? You didn’t “cut me off” after my mother died. You texted me back! You asked if I was okay! So what the fuck is all this drama about? Why have I been making an eight-year federal case out of it? You didn’t “desert” me; you were right there, reacting totally appropriately to the news that your close friend had unexpectedly lost her horribly ill and destructive mother in an intensely disturbing manner.

I mean, if your mother had suddenly, gruesomely died, I definitely would’ve waited until you texted me a day later, then responded after a few hours with a gently furrowed brow and an “oh noes, u ok?”

You responded. What more did I want? How ungrateful was I, to find your response tepid? What could you have possibly done to satiate me, for whom nothing was good enough?

You didn’t “abandon” me, as I’ve described it in my head. You didn’t “ghost” me. You just…fell silent for a day. The worst day. But you knew I had plenty of people to talk to. I’m married, I have a shrink, my father is alive. I had Nan, David, Nell, Aimee, everyone. You knew I’d be fine without you.

But most of all, you knew that if you reached out to me, I would cling to you. I would depend on you. I would implicitly expect you to do for me what I would have done for you, and that is too much.

I would have done too much. I see that now. If it was you, and your mother had died, I would have FORCED all my “love” and “support” on you. I would have elbowed myself right to the middle of your mother’s death, no matter how strenuously you did not want me to. I was so dense, so sure of my own good intentions; I would have bullied and pressured you into so much more intimate emotional contact than you could withstand, right when you wanted most to be left alone to self-soothe.

Ignoring your actual needs! Under the guise of “love!” Now that’s maternal instinct.

Obviously, there was no way you could be as rabid as me. I was a walking engulfment, the Gulf of Erlbaum, in which even mermaids drowned. I was the Abominable snowman, causing avalanches in the wake of my every step. Even I would have suffocated under my own care.

Whatever I touch, starts to melt in my clutch! I’m too much.

No, you couldn’t do for me what I would have done to you. We both knew that. As always, you were set up to fail so I could feel superior. You could either devote the next six months of your life to me and my bereavement, or you could be A Bad Person. Forever. No other options. You were entrapped. Our whole relationship was a trap.

So if you needed to withdraw from me slightly, and take a little psychological distance from me in the very short term, it was easily understandable, easily forgivable. You had your own life-and-death health issues to contend with. You were in a prestigious and demanding career-advancing program. You’d just told me the other day how draining it was that some of the younger members had drafted you as a godmother, how their non-stop twentysomething drama was distracting you from your work.

I didn’t want to be a distraction. I didn’t want to get in your way. You know I never meant to make things harder for you. I know I made things impossible.

I’m…awful. I am the worst I have ever been. Why didn’t you call me? Why did you leave me hanging like that? You just dropped off the face of the internet? Do you know what I’ve been through in the last 36 hours? And you call yourself my friend? Do you realize that your silence until now has been the most painful part of all of this? Where the fuck did you go?

I’m okay, I texted. Thanks.