“Do whatever you want, Kristi, I’m done here,” I angrily texted after being removed as my friend’s maid of honour for speaking up over what I felt were unreasonable demands. But friends fight, and I was sure we’d laugh about this in a couple weeks over penis flutes.
That was the last time Kristi and I would speak for five years. The wedding came and went, and I never even received an invite. I reached out, attempting to mend fences a couple months after our initial argument, but I received radio silence. The experience was so painful and disorienting that I flew home to my dad’s house in Florida and cried for a week into my cat’s fur.
I’d heard about best-friend breakups, but I never envisioned it happening to us.
I first met Kristi freshman year at Northwestern University after we’d each bombed a mainstage audition and decided to get drunk together. Where I was the introverted and observant type with an outward stoicism and a rotating collection of combat boots, she was an extroverted, social butterfly who enjoyed humming along to “Mary Poppins” while stencilling turquoise owls onto her bedroom walls. We were kind of like if Daria and Quinn actually liked each other and went and swigged cheap-ass vodka together on a dorm-room floor. We were perfect complements.
From that crummy audition on, Kristi was the sister I never had. We shared apartments in Chicago, took vacations to New York together to see Broadway shows, and even moved to California in unison after graduation. We may have even swapped hookup buddies a time or two (after granting each other explicit permission).
But as we approached 30 and our lives began moving in different directions, we struggled to connect. I was transitioning into a writing career in Los Angeles while she was settling down in Sacramento with her fiancé. I’d run script ideas by her, but she didn’t care to hear them, claiming it impinged on our having fun. When I questioned her sudden disinterest in my life, she uncharacteristically responded by judging my day jobs and Craigslist roommates, as though my struggles were immature and not worthy of her time.
Similarly, she’d call me to discuss wedding preparations that I found insignificant, deeming her quandary over the perfect shade of bridesmaids’ gowns a frivolous problem to heap upon an artist in survival mode.
We’d always been different people, but our values had never diverged to this extent. We became distant and entirely self-absorbed. As resentment mounted, all it took was one, heated text exchange for the lid to completely blow. Just like that… an entire era was sunk. Once that reality set in, I ached everywhere.
Over those five years that weren’t, I saw on Instagram that she had a son; she saw I’d published in new magazines. Here and there, we’d exchange happy birthday messages or congratulatory comments on social media. Where there was once a deep closeness, there was now just a gaping void. I’d resigned myself to the sad fact that our friendship was firmly in the past.
Courtesy of Cara Danielle Brown
So when she texted me out of the blue — “would love to catch up soon” — I wasn’t sure how to feel. The message seemed awfully casual in the context of everything that happened. What about those times I reached out to her and got ignored?
Frozen, I stared at my phone. On the one hand, I really missed her. On the other, I was incredibly hurt that I’d been cut out so unceremoniously. And, on still another, I felt guilty over my part in it, too. I wanted to talk to her, but I wasn’t sure I could forgive. I wasn’t sure she could either. And why now? I wasn’t sure of much of anything other than there was nothing to lose by having a conversation, and I needed not take issue with the envelope the offer came in. Underneath it all, I really was ecstatic she’d reached out.
The call came early on a Thursday evening while I typed on my laptop. I hesitantly answered after the most amount of rings. For a few minutes, there were some awkward first-date pleasantries. Then I called out the elephant in the room: I should have shown up for her more at that particular time in our lives, but I didn’t feel my punishment fit the crime.
I could tell she was uncomfortable, but she owned her part, too, stating she’d lost herself during wedding planning and felt she’d been selfish. She now missed old friends because they reminded her of who she was. Then she stammered as she apologised for not knowing how to apologise better. It was crystallising for me in that moment how much she disliked confrontation and how different our conflict styles were.
Was this… the start of a best-friend reconciliation? Her apology was pretty lacklustre, was I prepared to let her off that easily? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that, after hanging up, my shoulders dropped, and my body felt lighter. It’s crazy the way pain lives inside you when it isn’t given anywhere else to go.
I was happy to be back in touch, but I was honestly skeptical how close we would ever be again. We’d missed huge milestones. Time had elapsed. Trust had been shattered.
So when she proposed visiting each other, I wasn’t ready. In fact, I let the invitation sit for a few months until a bout of writers’ block-induced anxiety nearly drove me to the brink and, really needing to get away, I asked if she’d like to meet me in the middle of California at Hearst Castle. She replied she’d love a night away from mom duty. But even after we’d chosen a date, I almost cancelled. My bedroom window was leaking from a particularly heavy rainstorm, and it would have been so easy to just… not go. This reconciliation all seemed so out of nowhere. Was this at all about me ,or did she just need an exit ramp from the slog of life?
I took a breath and acknowledged it was likely both. These days, I recognised answers weren’t always all one thing or the other. Life is fuckin’ hard. Sometimes you just want the people around who know and love you.
Courtesy of Cara Danielle Brown
Throughout the entire three-hour drive to San Simeon, I wondered if I should prepare topics of conversation in case there were awkward lulls, but I ultimately decided against it. Let’s just let whatever is there, be there, I thought. This didn’t deter me, however, from arriving a few minutes early to redo my hair and put on lipstick. She texted a few minutes out that she, too, still needed to put on mascara. We’d mopped beer-soaked streamers off the floor of our rickety college apartment in unlaundered T-shirts at 7 a.m., but there’s an anxiety that comes with a reunion which screams, If nothing else, they can’t think I totally let myself go.
As I walked across the pavement toward the visitor centre, I spotted Kristi’s blonde ponytail and denim jacket near some shrubbery. She looked up from her phone, and she saw me too. The same jubilant girl I’d met at 18 years old power walked over to me with a huge smile and warm hug as though no time had passed. She looked exactly the same. It felt amazing to see her.
Even though our reunion may have felt a little too breezy, a little too fast, it was clear she was choosing to put the past in the past. Nonconfrontational — that was her way. I could see she needed to do that. And, as her friend, I realised I needed to let her do that. This was imperfect, no way around that. But I wanted her in my life more than I wanted to be mad at her. I reminded myself our friendship flourished when we accepted each other as we were. There was nothing false or inauthentic about that. We were here. We were trying.
Once I gave over, the rest of the trip was so unawkward, it was almost awkward. As we boarded the bus to take us up the hill to the castle, Kristi exuberantly showed me a photo of her 3-year-old son trying to ride her pit bull, Bianca, and another of her family’s second house in Tahoe. I entertained Kristi with anecdotes of showbiz, burlesque classes I’d taken, and the museum exhibit that is Hinge.
Married, she listened wide-eyed to my dating stories, as though she’d stumbled upon an exciting, secret portal. She seemed genuinely fascinated by the breadth of my experiences and covetous of my “me” time — quite a different reception than I’d received when last we left off. Similarly, I was surprised to find myself admiring the warmth and fullness of her life. Five years ago, I may have mischaracterised her burgeoning lifestyle as prescriptive and confining — but confining is only ever in the eye of the beholder. No one knows that better than the woman who has a self-destructive relationship with her writing career. Kristi had the foresight to acquire some of the things I never knew I wanted until I realised I didn’t have them. I could see that now.
It’s been a year since Kristi and I got back in touch and six months since Hearst Castle. We continue to catch up every few weeks by phone, exchange existential and musical theatre-themed Instagram reels that remind us of each other, and text quick tips on sex, books and asshole colleagues. We’ve even committed to planning another trip as soon as our lives slow down a bit. Perhaps Sonoma. Or maybe Vegas.
Probably the biggest realisation I’ve made over the past year is how little our breakup actually had to do with our lives diverging — and how much it had to do with the fact we’d stopped truly seeing each other. Five years ago, Kristi and I were each at crossroads in life, terrified of the choices we were making, insecure in who we were, and desperate to receive reassurance from the one person who mattered most… the one person without the capacity to provide it at that time. We hadn’t realised how much the other needed us, and so we grew resentful and judgmental. It was partly out of hurt, but mostly as a way of validating our own choices. Now, years after the divergence happened and our identities felt more secure, we really appreciated each other’s lives.
Courtesy of Cara Danielle Brown
This experience even made me question the growing normalcy of friendship breakups. Occasionally, they can be warranted. But, so often, friends think they’ve irreversibly grown apart when they haven’t become different people at all — they’ve just started showing up differently. That can be fixed if both parties are able to look within and willing to fight for the relationship. She’s since admit she should have done a lot of things differently. So have I. Had Kristi and I written each other off forever, we would have missed out on so much.
It took courage and vulnerability to risk opening ourselves back up — to trust each other not to shatter a sacred piece of our hearts (again). Sure, we both made mistakes, but none were so egregious that the relationship had to end. Life has a way of teaching us that things are both way more nuanced and nowhere near as complicated as we want to make them.
I think we had to meet each other again — wiser and more grown — to say, “I’m sorry,” “I love you,” “This is stupid, “Let’s do better,” and, most importantly, “Let’s move on.”
I’m so grateful we did.
An award-winning script writer, essayist, and journalist, Cara Danielle Brown holds a degree from Northwestern University’s School of Communications. Her work has appeared in Variety, Travel + Leisure, Cosmopolitan, Shondaland, Yahoo! Finance and other outlets. She is also the recipient of the 2020 Humanitas New Voices Prize, an award Barbra Walters once called the Pulitzer Prize of American Television.
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