Neighbors (The Real Thing Collection, #6)

by Elizabeth LaBan

And yes, we fell in love—not in a romantic way, but in the way that female friends do when they feel intangibly connected.

my friendships with Elizabeth and a small, sacred group of other women would become the reason I feel safe in the world. It’s been eighteen years, and through every major change of my life, I have chosen Elizabeth.

When your best friend lives on your street, the line between friend and family starts to blur. You find yourself hanging out together at all hours of the day and night, and you no longer see the front door of the other’s house as a barrier. Eventually, anyway.

Our lives were inextricably intertwined—we

Pop culture, psychology, and the Internet have given birth to an entire cottage industry for dealing with romantic breakups, but the heartache of potentially losing a friend—of losing our person—is discussed publicly far less frequently.

“For whatever reason, we don’t have social mechanisms in place to convey the power of our devotion, or express our pain at its loss.”

Some life changes—like moving to the suburbs—you can control. Others, like the collapse of your best friend’s marriage, you can’t control, no matter how much you bargain with the universe.

Gradually, I began to remind her of the life she was leaving behind, and she began to turn away from me.

I knew my hanging around wasn’t helping, but I couldn’t bring myself to go inside and close the door. I was afraid I would miss the moment when she drove away.

That day, neither of us was able to give the other what she hoped for and needed. We were both too terrified about voicing what might be lost.

There is a scene in the novel we wrote together, published years later, when one character tells the other that if either is lucky enough to have a long marriage, it isn’t going to be all black and white; some of it is going to be gray. We were deep in the gray of our friendship that day.

But the relationships that mean the most to us are often the most confusing and hard, and you get through the pain because you choose to or not. You choose that person. And I still chose her.

Now, years later, it’s easy to make sense of it all—the whole of our relationship, the way we would find, then lose, then find each other again. But during that long, dark stretch in my life, I had no idea where we would end up.

Every visit was too short, and we always left each other reluctantly, both saying how much we missed each other and how good it felt to be together. Every good-bye felt like another tiny heartbreak over our lost life together.

Jared put me on a pedestal for a few glorious months, until all the things that were good about me began to morph into their dark cousins—independence became selfishness, professional success was the reason I couldn’t take care of him, my free-spiritedness made me untrustworthy. He told me I was too sensitive, someone no one had ever really loved. I came to believe every terrible thing he said about me.

The minute I woke up, I knew it was going to be a strange day. I didn’t know it was going to be a day I would remember for the rest of my life.

But I kept thinking it would ease up as they settled deeper into their life together. The thing is, it never did; it got worse.

Unconscious, on a noisy breathing machine. I sat with her for hours, reading to her, talking. I felt completely alone.

On a day when I felt so alone, a day when my head was spinning and I couldn’t think of what to do first or next, Melissa was there, as solid as ever, holding me up. When I think back on that day now, I think of it as light and dark. An ending and a moving forward.

The relationship that started as blissful had devolved into a constant stream of criticism and a perpetually moving line for what was acceptable. No matter what I did or how much I twisted myself into a pretzel, I never seemed to be enough for him.

I still choose her, and she still chooses me.

Roman Catholic nun Sister Joan Chittister, in her book The Friendship of Women, describes female friendship in a way that resonates most for us: it “binds past and present and makes bearable the uncertainty of the future.”