A love letter to a friend

A friend moves away - and so begins my year of feelings

Last fall, for the first time in my life, I started going to individual therapy. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships in my life, especially about my friendships. I have a lot of deep feelings for my friends, but the thing is, I don’t share them.

Normally when a friend moves away, I give hugs and spew platitudes, saying things like “we’ll see each other soon” even if it’s not true. There’s a sort of safety in it. By never exactly saying goodbye, I don’t have to accept that things will be different.

I don’t want to do that any longer. I want to share my feelings with the people I care about, whether that’s love, frustration, or tears.

This is the year that I want to feel my feelings about my friends. So here it goes, starting with this piece.

—

“We’re officially moving to New York!”

“What? When?”

“End of January.”

My stomach dropped. I knew that K and her partner had been talking about moving to New York, but it had always been sometime far off into the future. I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon - and certainly not in the next two months. Who would I go on city walks and backpacking trips with? How many hangouts did we have left?

—

K and I first met freshman year of college. We weren’t meant to be close. She was white, and I only hung out with Asians. She wanted to live in a double. I wanted to live in quad. We were interested in different majors. We wanted to be in different sororities. But the dorm housing algorithm ignored our rooming requests and stuck us in the same quad. Then, we ended up in the same sorority. By junior year, we had even chosen the same major. With all of this shared time together, we became closer than I ever would have expected.

Post-graduation, we both moved to San Francisco for work. While I normally love exploring new cities, I did not like SF. I hated walking home through the impersonal, industrial streets of SOMA, navigating the unintuitive and screechy BART system, and trying to figure out the massively intimidating ultimate frisbee scene. But K, who was from the Bay Area, was determined to get me to give SF a chance. That first month, we hiked up Twin Peaks to see the city, ferried to Angel Island, and got burritos from the Mission. For Halloween, we went to Half Moon Bay to pick out pumpkins to carve. She even took me on my first backpacking trip, going with me to REI to get hiking shoes, teaching me what food to pack, and showing me how to dig a hole in the ground to poop. Because of K, I began to accept life in SF. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how much she had helped build the foundation for my life here in the Bay Area.

—

It’s mid-December and we’re weaving up a mountain pass on our way to Lake Tahoe. But unlike everyone else on the road, we’re not skiing. We’re going snow camping. If you had told Kelly five years ago that she’d willingly drive 4+ hours to go camping in the snow, she would have thought you were crazy. But somehow three years ago, K had convinced me to look past my intense fear of the cold and sign up for a snow camping class — and now snow camping was just one of the things we did together for fun.

The last time we had gone on a trip together was almost 10 months ago - this year had been different, with K preparing for and hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, so our normal cadence of outdoor trips had fallen to the wayside.

It’s clear that we are out of practice. The car ride doesn’t feel the same as it did in the past. I’m struggling to be present - my mind won’t stop buzzing with chores to do, people to coordinate with, and wondering what the cats are up to today. But as time passes, we start to warm up, and the conversation falls onto me.

“So I’ve started going to therapy.”

“Oh? How has that been?”

“I’ve been learning so much. Like about feelings and stuff. Like this past week, I realized that I’m not as vulnerable as I think. I talk about stuff, but I don’t really talk about how I’m feeling. I don’t share my deepest feelings with my friends. I mean, I think I want to, but I don’t know how.”

I give a small awkward chuckle — I can’t help but try to lessen the weight of my words through laughter.

She asks a few more questions, and I think the conversation is going to drift away to another more palatable topic, when she pauses.

“Well, you can be vulnerable with me.”

Her words make me freeze. I know she’s giving me a place to share what’s in my heart, but I just can’t. I can feel this huge wall between my and my feelings, but I’m too scared to tear it down. Not right now. I let the words wash over me and float away.

We fall into silence. After some time, K speaks.

“When I was alone on the PCT, I really appreciated our impromptu phone calls. I don’t think I ever told you. But it made me feel so much less lonely. So thank you.”

I don’t know how to process her words. It’s too much. So by I wave it off. But K is used to this. I guess she already knew how much I struggled with sharing my feelings long before I had told her this today.

“Well you can always share anything with me whenever you’re ready.”

—

As much as I wanted to share, I didn’t know where to begin. Because the thing is, there are no words that can properly convey how grateful I am for our friendship.

For so long, I’ve taken her friendship for granted. When I was busy making new work friends or practicing during in the frisbee season, I’d put our friendship on hold. But even so, K never stopped inviting me on backpacking trips, asking me months in advance so that some trips might work out.

It wasn’t until I joined her on the John Muir Trail and hiked 300 miles together that I truly learned to value our friendship. For 28 days, we were each other’s main companion — sharing meals, conversation, even the same tent— yet somehow, we continued to get along. And in all those shared hours of beauty, suffering, conversation, and silence, I gained a new appreciation for K. For her love of trees, plushy moss, and doing trail laundry after a long day. For her ability to strike up a conversation with anyone. For her genuine interest in my thoughts and her lack of judgment regardless of the topic.

I realized that trip that all this time, no matter what I was going through, K was there for me. When I was frustrated with new-grad life, she was the one who wrote a 25 Before 25 bucket list with me. When I needed a place to stay before gallivanting off to New Zealand, she shared her room with me for an entire month. When I felt isolated and alone in Wellington, she was the one who checked in on me from thousands of miles away. When I was nervous about moving out of SF and into the suburbs, she would come down and visit even though it wasn’t easy without a car.

—

I never did manage to articulate my feelings in person. The weekend before she left, I stopped by her going away party, but I barely interacted with her and left early. The next day, I visited again, hoping for a heart to heart, but ended up sitting on her couch for hours, barely participating in the banter, but also being unwilling to leave.

I didn’t know how to create the environment I needed to be brave. No matter how much I wanted to share my feelings in person, I just wasn’t ready. Even when my partner did manage to get me on FaceTime the night before she left, all I could do was hiccup and wipe away my tears.

Writing this piece is the furthest I’ve been able to get. And for now, it’ll have to do.

K, I hope this conveys everything I wasn’t able to say.

I miss you.

I love you.

<3 Kelly