'Sometimes the cracks get too big.' Why I'm letting a 40-year friendship go.

This article was originally published on Medium.

I met Clara* 40 years ago in year seven Social Studies — a class where the drone of the teacher's voice and the way he picked relentlessly at his face lingers like a faded photograph in my cerebral cortex.

Clara sat at the desk in front of mine. She was wickedly funny and precociously smart. She noticed everything, including how often I laughed at her jokes, which were frequent and brutal and absurd. That's how our friendship started — with laughter.

We used to duck into the girls' bathroom after class to refresh our lip gloss and eyeliner (a newly acquired skill). Once, she'd tied my shoelaces to my desk right when the bell rang. I'd helplessly watched the class empty out while I tried to untie myself.

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Clara had been thorough. She'd made double knots and ultimately had to help me get unstuck. We'd laughed so hard — the kind of laughter that bubbles up from deep inside your gut and makes your body shake. A year later, Clara and I graduated from middle school. She went to a private high school and I went to public school and we lost touch for a while.

Two years later, Clara transferred into my high school in the middle of year 10. I'd gone from rarely seeing her to having her front and centre in my daily life. This would become a pattern throughout our friendship.

Suddenly, Clara was in the hallways of my school, easily making friends at a place where I always struggled to be seen. Clara was the Earth. The rest of us were moons orbiting her greatness.

Our friendship was instantly rekindled, instantly intense. There was no room for anyone else in my life but Clara. But that was okay because I didn't have many friends in year 10. I was shy, awkward, and scared of everything. I was one of the only Jewish kids in a school of thousands and I felt this difference keenly.

Clara was half Jewish. Clara liked that I was weird. She had the unique ability to step outside of the teenage experience and observe it from a distance. She was an old soul among fumbling children.

Clara became my world, my closest confidant. She knew how deeply insecure I was, how deeply troubled, and how deeply funny. Laughter was our bond. It remained central to our friendship throughout high school. She accepted me at a time when I didn't accept myself.

In retrospect, there were cracks in our friendship from the very beginning. She made friends easily and abandoned me often, only to return when she got tired of her new crowd. She was brilliant but troubled and needed more attention from adults than any of us got in the eighties. She could be incredibly cruel.

By the time we were 20, I was living on my own in the world's tiniest apartment, working full-time, and going to college at night. My parents had moved a few hours away to follow my father's job. Clara was living at home, job hopping, and struggling through community college. She crashed at my apartment regularly. We went out on weekends. I drank too much and she made sure I got home safe.

She was at my place most Friday nights, staying through Sunday. We'd watch terrible movies on my crappy TV and she'd cook for me, making whatever paltry food I had taste delicious. She was fastidious where I was a slob. She was an amazing cook where I was happy to live on cereal and ramen noodles.

Laughter remained the glue that kept our friendship strong even as the cracks grew wider. But there was also codependency and an imbalance of power. I always felt like I wasn't interesting or smart enough. I tried to be the person I thought she wanted me to be, but the friendship was perpetually breaking apart. A fight could drive her from my life for months and, eventually, years.

I don't know what Clara remembers about our worst fight ever. It was the year I'd started dating my husband and she'd wanted to take a road trip one weekend. I'd said yes, but then I'd gotten sick with a cold and wanted to stay home.

I'd been afraid to cancel our weekend plans for the lame reason of not feeling like going anywhere that weekend. I knew she'd be mad, but I underestimated how mad. I wanted to be honest, so I told her I wasn't up to the road trip. I admitted that I'd wanted to stay home, rest, and hang out with my shiny new boyfriend. I told her over the phone, while sitting at my desk at work.

There was yelling and crying and we hung up on each other. She instantly withdrew from my life. I saw her at a party a few weeks later and tried to talk to her. "F**k you," she'd said as she left the party. I didn't hear from her again for years.

She moved to Europe in 1995 and missed my wedding in 1998. Clara reappeared in my life around the time I got pregnant with my daughter, Ana, in 2000. By then, she'd returned to the States and was working and living about two hours from me.

We fell into a kind of comfortable cadence after that, where we mostly stayed in touch. But breaks in our friendship — and subsequent reunions — were something I'd come to expect. It wasn't always about getting into a dramatic fight. Sometimes we drifted apart or life got busy. She ultimately moved out of the country again, then settled in another state when she returned.

Something began shifting as we reached our late 30s. Clara lived a thousand miles away. It's just a two-hour plane ride from New York, but between my young family, my aversion to travel, and my perpetual lack of money, I never visited (beyond one time when I flew out to see her new baby).

Clara has always moved around much more than me and, I suspect, never understood my reticence to travel. Honestly, I don't understand it either. I'm perpetually striving for normalcy, happy to be home and close to my family. She's always seeking adventure, leaving home, perhaps searching for new people.

Like many people our age, we joined Facebook around 2009 and stayed connected online. We spoke on the phone and sent each other birthday cards. This was what our friendship looked like for the next few years.

When my daughter was diagnosed with cancer in 2012, Clara was there for me — commenting on every Facebook update, calling me, texting me late at night while I sat in the hospital waiting for scan results and trying to survive.

When my Ana died, Clara flew out to visit me so she could help me with the memorial. She painted my living room. She cleaned. She made sure I ate. That's the last time I saw her. She flew home two days later.

Clara's father died a few years ago and I didn't fly out to be with her. I was still reeling with my own grief from losing my daughter. I didn't have enough money. I probably had to work. I don't know. There's always a reason for me not to travel.

I regret this failure to be there for her. She withdrew from my life again, stopped commenting on my social media posts, and didn't respond when I called or texted her. When she finally did answer her phone, I apologised for not being there for her. I told her I loved her. I tried to explain how my hatred of travel had turned into a full-blown phobia and how I wasn't as brave as I used to be. Grief had diminished me. I begged her to give me another chance.

She seemed to forgive me. We resumed a kind of broken correspondence — occasional phone calls, occasional texts. But this past summer, she stopped responding to my texts again. I tried calling her and my calls went to voicemail, so I left messages. Eventually, I got a single text response from her. She said she was overwhelmed with life and that she'd reach out to me when she was ready. She asked me not to call or text her.

That was five months ago, and I haven't heard from her at all. I think, probably, this friendship is over.

I still love Clara. I miss her, but I'm tired. I can't be the person I imagine she wants me to be. Or maybe it's not about me at all. Maybe the cracks that have been forming all these years are just too big to repair. The reason for this current rift doesn't really matter. My heart isn't strong enough to keep finding and losing someone who means — who meant — so much to me.

It never mattered to me how many months or years passed between phone calls, I was always glad to talk to her. She always made me laugh so hard my entire body shook. To this day, no one has made me laugh as hard as Clara.

I wish the best for her. I want only happiness, adventure, and love for the friend who helped shaped my worldview. But being friends with Clara is hard for me and it's gotten harder as I've gotten older. I know that being friends with me is hard too, especially this diminished, distracted, grief-stricken version of my former self. Friendships don't always survive and that's okay.

There is rarely a day that goes by that I don't think of Clara, wonder about her life, and hope she's okay — especially when something makes me laugh out loud. It will always be laughter that reminds me of Clara. I appreciate every layer of our friendship. I am better for knowing her.

We were friends for 40 years. That's most of my life. I thought we'd be friends forever — she was like family, but I'm old enough to know that nothing is guaranteed. I've learned that sometimes the best gift we can give someone is to let them go without guilt or judgement. I hope she understands this too.

*Name changed for privacy.

For more stories from Jacqueline Dooley, check out her Medium page here.

Feature image: Getty Images.