loss

the other night i was lying on the couch catching up on some dvr when my phone rang. it was an unknown number, so i ignored it, as i usually do; a few moments later the phone beeped to tell me i had a voicemail. the message started with giggling, then the phone was passed around a table with different people saying "hi, alice!" then finally got to the owner of the phone, who said something along the lines of "i guess we should tell you who this is... it's lorelei! and alana, and mike!! call us back when you get this, we would love to catch up and say hi!!"

lorelei, alana, and mike are not their real names, incidentally. but the back story on each of them:

alana: my freshman roommate in college; we had a great time together and made great roommates. i ended up living in the french house on campus after freshman year, though (i know, i'm a dork).

matt: a buddy from our freshman hall.

lorelei: as a freshman hallmate who practically lived in the room with alana and me; she and alana ended up roommates for the subsequent two years.

after we graduated, i talked lorelei into moving down to dc with me, and we got an apartment with a third girl i also knew from college. i had just started at the airline, and got lorelei an interview in my department. she got the job, and things were awesome. we'd get up, get ready for work, commute to work together, literally sit next to eat other all day at work, go to lunch together, take breaks together, commute home together, and then hang out with our third roommate at night... and do the whole thing over again the next day.

in other words, we were bff and around each other 24/7.

she had a boyfriend who lived up in maryland, and often he'd come pick her up and take her to his house for the weekends, and i usually wouldn't hear from her at all when that happened. lorelei was not what you'd call "good at keeping in touch," so when she wasn't at our house or with me at work, i usually wouldn't hear from her.. even if i called or texted. it wasn't just me - she was like that with pretty much everyone. except her boyfriend, i guess.

fast forward a year and a half, and lorelei decided suddenly (or maybe just told us suddenly, i suppose) that she was moving to baltimore to be closer to the boyfriend and quitting her job at the airline. i was sad, especially because i knew her track record at returning calls / being a long distance friend, but she vowed to keep in touch and talk to me regularly. i believed her, because seriously. we spent ALL DAY, EVERY DAY together, basically talking incessantly. there was nothing that went on in either of our lives that the other person didn't instantly know everything about.

except with the move to baltimore, she virtually dropped off the face of the planet. she stopped answering phone calls. emails became spotty. she came to visit once - the third roommate and i were thrilled! - but it turns out it was basically just an excuse to pick up a couch we'd been holding on to for her. her boyfriend dropped her off on a friday night, and the march for women's rights was being held the next day, so i asked if she wanted to participate, which she agreed to. she ended up bowing out that morning, so i begged her not to leave before i got back from the march, or at the very least, call me if the boyfriend showed up and if it was a good time for me to head back, i'd do it so i could say goodbye before she left. i never got a call, and when i got home both lorelei and the couch were gone.

it was crappy. i didn't understand how she was able to go from having me 100% present in her life to not caring to hear from me or talk to me AT ALL. we hadn't had a fight; i was nearly certain she wasn't mad at me... i knew it was basically just laziness. she had more or less replaced me with her boyfriend. i, however, was left with a pretty gaping void in my life.

after that, i'd occasionally get an email from her after six months of silence, asking excitedly how i was, and what was going on with my life, and she missed me so much, and how were things, and tell her everything!!! in turn, i'd get all excited because OMG! LORELEI WROTE ME! hooray! and write a big email back about everything going on in my life and asking how she was, and how the boyfriend was, and how the new job was...... and she'd never, ever write back.

six months, eight months, five months later, rinse and repeat.

and EVERY TIME, i'd get my hopes up that she was coming back in my life, and every time, i was let down.

finally, i realized that i would never in a thousand years allow a boy to treat me this way. if i had some boyfriend who kept jerking me around, and popping back into my life with promises and declarations of love and telling me this time things would be different... he'd get exactly one chance, and then i'd write him off. why was i allowing myself to be treated like this, just because it was a girlfriend and not a boyfriend?

as a result, i stopped writing back to the sporadic, maybe-once-a-year emails. i hadn't heard from lorelei in probably three years by the time i got the call the other night.

i didn't call her back.