There were others who left without dying, of course.
My best friend in junior high was a spunky girl named Carlye. We met in 7th grade, because we were forced to feign being musical for two years and we both chose choir over band. She played basketball, as did I, and the year our extra-curricular AAU team took the city championships we played together. She was shorter than I was, blonder. Her laugh was loud and genuine, and she was endlessly ticklish. Hoopfest teams, slumber parties, talks of her first kiss, and talk of the promise of mine, characterized our relationship. We spent weekends and evenings together, summer days by the pool when we weren’t on a basketball court. We had mutual friends, but she knew me best. My mom and her mom got along famously; she had a little sister around the same age as my little sister, and it looked to be a friendship match made in heaven. Then, the summer before our freshman year of high school, she moved. A mere hour away, and yet the distance was palpable, as neither of us had driver’s licenses, or cars. My mom and hers would drive half-way between our two cities and I would wave my mother goodbye and spend two days with my best of all friends; the next weekend she would do the same. For awhile we did that, meeting in the middle, spending time together. But as weeks, months and years passed the visits happened with less and less frequency. We were both busy. Busy with school, playing basketball, making new friends and trying to keep A averages. I saw her less and less, and then, not at all.
After Carlye left two more of my closest friends moved away from our city, away from me. I missed Lisa and Erin immensely, though for awhile we tried writing letters, meeting at basketball camps in the summer-time, or at Priest Lake where we spent weekends training our skin to look darker, swimming and magazine-reading, day-dreaming about boys we would never meet. We fell apart, and then together, further apart, and then closer together. It was a rhythm I grew accustomed to, but one I never appreciated. There were days I was inconsolable, days my mother walked in on me sobbing myself to sleep. She held me and told me it would be OK. I didn’t believe her. The only “OK” I knew was a compromised, imperfect version. It was never the way it was, the way I wanted it. It would never be.
My first kiss turned into an eight year on-again off-again relationship with a boy who couldn’t decide what he wanted and so routinely left and returned, left and returned for all of those eight years. He became finely skilled in the art of leaving, having at one point in his young life given up on everyone, including himself. He sunk himself into a vat of sticky despair and before I knew it I was convincing myself I could save him, proclaiming fearlessly that I would pull him out of his self-imposed darkness. My naiveté was not an ample life-preserver, and instead of me rescuing him he pulled me into his sticky vat to sit with him, covering me in excuses and melancholy, marinating me in guilt and self-doubt. I crawled out of that coupledom reeking of someone not me, my hair, my skin, my faith in myself as matted and dark as his outlook on life.
When a man I dated for less than a year left me I was ready for it, but not prepared for how badly it would hurt, ill-equipped for how much it would break me. He had tried leaving before I miscarried, but had ultimately stayed. Stayed of his own accord and yet our relationship was damaged, our trust in one another hanging by conversational threads. He promised he would stay. I wanted so much to believe him, and so I pretended to hang on his every word in a feeble attempt to make semantics a reality. A week after I lost what had begun growing inside of me, on the anniversary of my father’s death, we said goodbye. Goodbye for good, and the part of me that so passionately, so recklessly, so fearlessly wanted to love him, that part of me stopped breathing.