There’s this girl I know.

I don’t do personal entries very often anymore because just about everyone I know has or eventually will discover my website and I know many of my friends, family, and coworkers take the time out of their day to read what I have to say. So over the last year or so my content has been fairly generic, interesting tidbits I come across on the internet, photos, politics, general musings from everyday life etc. Nothing overly offensive or revealing I guess.

But I wanted to write about something that has been bothering me for a while and my blog is supposed to be my place where I can express whatever without fear of being judged or criticized. The magic of the internet is if someone happens to leave me feedback that I find less then favorable I can simply delete it, I wish it could be like that in reality.

So there’s this girl I know, her and I are, or were, very good friends. I remember when we started talking online, it has to be almost 4 years ago now. I helped her create a logo for a southwestern furniture website she was working on, and I don’t know how we got into talking after that but we just sort of hit it off. When I worked as a security guard I would have these 12 hour shifts that could last all day or night, some of the places I would watch were pretty boring, others could get pretty scary. I would bring my notebook with me to work and try to find an internet connection of some sort just so I could get online to chat with her, we would discuss anything and everything for just hours, it helped pass the time I guess.

After a while we became close friends, I encouraged her to start blogging again and we both loved to mess around with our websites and talk about our interests in movies, music, computers, programming, we just had so much in common. Although the concept of a real relationship was wildly unrealistic, over time I formed a little crush on her. Hell a crush is an understatement, I had some serious feelings for her for a long time. While this was going on she slowly started shifting her focus onto athletics. First she got into skydiving, she would always joke that she was jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. How cool was that, I knew someone that jumps out of airplanes in their free time. She had all sorts of pictures and videos made, it was awesome. Then she learned about the Tour de Cure, an annual set of bike rides that are held all over the country to support diabetes research. She purchased a bike and started getting into it, she purchased another bike, and another. Now It’s her lifelong mission to ride in a Tour de Cure in every state and she’s well prepared to do so. She started a website for her travels, she’s constantly training… She’s determined.

Around this time is where our friendship started to take a big turn into what it is today. Between work and her activities she didn’t have a lot of time to devote to other things. She also announced that she was going to start dating someone she knew from school, I guess the whole combination of everything crushed me. I never felt more depressed, I even took personal time from work, I felt like something big was being taken away from me and I didn’t want it to happen. I quickly got obsessive which was wrong because it only made it worse.

Somehow I got over it, I thought hard about my relationship with her and what I wanted from it and really I just wanted a friend. So that’s what we were, we continued to be good friends. But over time that friendship slowly continued to dwindle away, I’d get to talk to her a few times a week, then just the weekends, then maybe once a week, and now it’s maybe 1 phone call or a couple text messages every couple of weeks if I’m lucky, and most of the time we end up talking about her triathlons, marathons, bike rides, and swims and less about just life in general. As it was all falling apart we got into a few fights along the way. I tried to express that I didn’t like where it was going, she will express her priorities and apparently “friends” just isn’t one of them anymore. She’s well aware of what’s going on and she can accept it, she can get over it and the fact that she has the ability to do that just rips me apart. I feel like all of the effort put into building something special was for nothing and instead of being terrified that something as important as a good friendship is being taken away, I feel like it was never there to begin with.

We fought again last night, I made a comment this week about our lack of communication and I was a little concerned that something was going on. Sure enough she is having some problems at home. With me supposedly being her friend you would think she would want to talk about what she’s going through and have someone to support her but instead she insists on pushing people away even further. Last night I felt like I was pushed over an edge, I just wasn’t worth her time anymore. The issue wasn’t that family came first, it was that my support wasn’t good enough for her to bother accepting it. I’m not going to keep going in circles about the whole thing, the bottom line is I have expectations from the people I call friends, I have standards just like she does. Last night she actually offered a commitment of 1 day or instance a week to talk to her as if it’s a privilege for me to do so, like I should be honored to be penciled into her schedule. It’s unacceptable and frankly given our history its offensive, I shouldn’t have to take a number and I’m not going to.

So from the bottom of my heart my best wishes do go out to her and her family, I know what it’s like to have family members in the hospital and I can only hope her sister will recover. I’ll always support her and what she does, and I’m glad she’s happy doing it. But I refuse to be confused for a fan, a groupie, or another subscriber that she can ignore or push away when she so chooses. I only wanted to be one thing to her and I expected the same in return, so as far as I’m concerned this entry is the timeline of our friendship - from start to finish.