Friend Request

by Laura Marshall

Odd, how you spend five years going to the same place every day, and then it’s over, you never go there again. Almost as if it never existed at all.

If I sleep, when I wake up I’ll have one blissful, terrible second when I’m unaware—and then it will all come crashing in on me, its power multiplied indefinitely by that one unknowing second.

but Facebook means I haven’t completely lost touch with my friends and old colleagues. I still know what’s going on in their lives—what their children look like, where they’ve been on holiday—and then on the odd occasions that we do meet, the thread that binds us is stronger than it would otherwise have been. So I keep posting, liking, commenting; it stops me from falling out of my world completely.

know that Facebook offers an idealized version of life, edited and primped to show the world what we want it to see.

She told me once that there’s a saying: you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.

I didn’t know then that you can’t stop someone from leaving you.

I don’t even know if there is such a thing as the truth when it comes to relationships, or only versions of it, shaped by love and fear and the way we lie to ourselves and others.

That night was the end of everything, and the beginning. The end of something is always the start of something else, even if you can’t see it at the time.

What my parents knew, and still know, is a highly edited version of me, a composite of who I was as a child and what I chose to show them of the person I was becoming.

When it comes down to it, we’re all alone. Sometimes we don’t even know ourselves.