friendship never ends

The Spice Girls lied and friendships died.  I can see it on a protest poster already.

The Spice Girls, in the height of their glory, once served as a shining rainbow beacon of hope for a little dainty boy in the suburbs of North Carolina.  That dainty boy was me.  I was devoted to them.  Was.  Who the fuck am I kidding?  I still am.  They were my first gay boy love.  I sat (see also: jumped) in the seventh row of their 2007 reunion tour.  Seriously, though.  Back in 6th grade, my first ever screen name was Spiceboy35.  I pretended to be one of their backup dancers in AOL Chatrooms.  My wall was a shrine to Scary and Ginger.  I literally broke the seat in the movie theater waiting for "Spice World" to come on because I was bouncing so furiously in anticipation.

But they lied to me.  They told me on their debut single, that we could "make it last forever; friendship never ends."  They were wrong!  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Of course, this isn't exactly something I'm just now figuring out.  I started discovering the careful deception they employed with "Wannabe" a while ago.  In high school, as friendships changed weekly, I still mostly believed in the Spice Girls mantra - I just thought that the friendships that ended weren't "true" friendships.  So, I revised the lyric on behalf of the Spice Girls (they were broken up at the time - so much for friendship never ending) to "true friendship never ends."

This new, revised motto helped me make sense of the friendships that I lost.  Those friendships, which succumbed to lack of communication, distance, more popular people, people who weren't gay and going to hell and the like, were never true blue friendships.  They were friendships of utility.  I served a need for them, or they served a need for me and it was over.  Still, in my mind, not the kind of stable, long-lasting friendships I had found in people like Mike, a friend I consider to be the real deal (who I bonded with over our love of the Spice Girls, amongst other things).  And that was okay - they weren't the kind of friends the Spice Girls were singing about.

As I grew up and my unhealthy obsession with the Spice Girls reached a more healthy equilibrium that I may very well be destroying with the very existence of this entry, my thoughts on friendship have grown.  This became clear to me with a lesson I learned, painfully, on New Year's Eve.

One of my longest-running friends came, along with a group of girls, to visit me for NYE in the big city. My very first one, and a dream come true, to be totally honest.  I've dreamt of spending a New Years in New York since I saw my first ball drop (hehe).  We have been close, at times closer than others, since high school.  As time has progressed and we've both been on our respective paths, it's become clear to me that they're not the same path.  We've never really been on the same path, actually, but we were always united by a sick sense of humor, a love of torturing the other, and quite honestly, through nights of crying and lamenting about ex-boyfriends and girlfriends.  Our friendship reached its pinnacle when we were both head over heels in crazy, codependent love with other people and engaged in self-destructive behavior.  And as we've both struggled to leave that foolish behavior behind, we've had varying degrees of success.

Meanwhile, because of what we've been through, I've been labeled as "The Best Friend."  This label is damning.  And I won't say I'm not guilty of labeling certain friends as "best" ones and others as "people I hit up for money" and others as "last resorts."  Who doesn't?  It wasn't until this wonderful New Year's Eve that I realized how fucking crazy that is.

On New Year's Eve, our friendship kind of exploded.  The worst part is, I had a feeling.  And not in the Black Eyed Peas sort of way.  More in the "I know this is going to end badly, and I should end it before it gets there" way.  But, I didn't.  Because I was supposed to be "The Best Friend."  And because the Spice Girls told me that friendship never ends, and I would end up being the asshole who made that truth a lie.

You see, I knew we couldn't remain friends forever.  As time progressed, I found myself less and less interested in those phone calls where we confided about relationships gone wrong, I found myself less patient giving advice that had been given hundreds of times before.  I just observed that things were going differently for the two of us, and the things that I once loved about our friendship, I now found tiring.

It's not an easy observation to make, nor is it a fun conclusion to come to.  I understand it's hard not to take personally, when the fact of the matter is her personality and my personality don't get along anymore.  And this is where I start realizing how foolish it is to place the label of "BFF" on anyone or anything.  As if Paris Hilton having a TV show about it wasn't a big enough red flag.  The more dependency you place on your friends, the more you expect from them, and the more you live in what your friendship was, the more hurt you're going to be when it ends.  All of those things are actually surefire ways to end a friendship.

And here's the kicker: they do end.  That's okay.  Life-changing revelation alert: people come in to your lives and they also leave at some point.  Does it make the time and the memories you had with them any less special, any less fun, any less meaningful and life-changing?  No.  I've come to find that the friendships with the most lasting impressions, that carry the most meaning, are the ones that don't subscribe to ridiculous Spice Girls songs.

If there's one thing I regret about the entire situation and the way our friendship ended (it did end, by the way - badly), it's that in all the years of friendship, I never found a way to explain this to her without creating what seemed to be a deeply offended, earth-shattering reaction.  There would be times when I would try to broach the subject or anything serious, really, about the nature of our friendship and how it would inevitably end, and instead of carrying on that conversation in a mature way, it would immediately escalate to "but you're supposed to be my best friend!" or, even worse, "you want me to die, don't you?"  When I look at these ridiculous statements now, I'm shocked that I was able to overlook the drama and insecurity of it all for so long.

But that's what we do, sometimes, as friends.  We put up with the utter insanity of keeping friendships because amazing girl groups like the Spice Girls tell us that we're assholes if we don't.  Isn't it better to let go of something with integirty than to continue it halfheartedly or even worse, with no real concern for the other?

The nature of friendship and what I seek in friends has drastically changed for me in the past couple of years.  I don't seek or keep friends anymore that I depend on, that I expect things from, or that I can't live in the present with.  The friendships that I want now are the ones that do nothing for me but enrich life.  Whether or not they'll enrich my life or I'll enrich theirs for the rest of it is unimportant to me now, and I'm confident that it doesn't detract from the meaning of our friendship.  Sometimes the best thing we can do is say "Goodbye."

Even the Spice Girls, those lying tramps, know that.