“Aren’t pickles one of the best things about being an adult?” I turn around in the grocery store aisle, jar of “bread and butter” pickles in hand. I stare at what I call a “baby grown-up” (aka newborn legal adult, between 18 and “my brain is fully developed”) in front of me, maybe a couple years older than my daughters, in her early twenties, long brown hair, sparkly earrings, freckles. “YES!!” I say, “Choosing your favorite pickles is such an underrated perk of being a grown-up!”
The baby grown-up stranger tells me about her best friend who loves pickles more than anything. “For her birthday every year, I just get her all different kinds of pickles.”
A dull pain bursts and spreads in my gut, mixed with surprise that I’m not the only one gifting birthday pickles to friends.
I squeeze my face into a smile and tell the stranger what a good friend she is. She asks me about my favorite kind of pickle (Cornichons by Napoleon). She corrects my pronunciation, then tells me about getting pickles in France that come with a small strainer in the jar, so you don’t have to stab the pickles with forks or get everyone’s finger cooties in the brine. A pickle jar with a strainer?! The French have all the best stuff—croissants and built-in pickle strainers.
As I walk to the check-out, I think of my friend who loves pickles more than anything (except her cat). Every time I see pickles, I think about her. For her birthday two years ago, one of my gifts was a jar of German pickles.
I also gave her a small, green, knitted and stuffed “emotional support pickle (ESP).” She left on a trip right after and took ESP with her, then sent me pictures of her pickle on vacation.
This year, for her birthday, we didn’t talk, but I don’t want to take the yearly reminder off my calendar.
She’s not dead. She’s very alive. She just does not want to be my friend anymore.
I still keep an Instagram folder of funny cat videos that I’ll never get to send her. I don’t even care about cats, but she does, and so the algorithm still faithfully delivers ridiculous cat content to me, although I no longer share them with her. I just put them in the saved folder and whisper to myself: You would find this hilarious. You would laugh so hard.
I wonder if she has a folder on her phone with ESP pictures she will never send me, or if she threw the pickle away.
She is one of those extreme ultra mega super long distance runners who stumble through deserts and across mountain ridges for days and nights on end, hallucinating and shitting themselves. She loves it. I don’t get it, but I love that she loves it.
I still have her races marked in my calendar. And that is sad. But what’s sadder is that I know she’s signed up for more races by now. Races that won’t be in my calendar at all because she doesn’t tell me about them anymore.
Sometimes, when I do heavy squats at the gym, I wonder if she ever got around to adding weightlifting to her routine to strengthen her quads for all those mountain runs.
We were going to do it together.
I thought we’d be funeral friends, that one of us would go to the other one’s funeral. If she dies first, I’m definitely going. If I die first, I really hope she comes. But for now, I avoid her favorite places in town.
When I asked why she no longer wanted to be friends, she didn’t respond. I’ve speculated why, but I think it’s just as likely that I’m completely wrong.
I thought the why mattered, but as I typed the one-word plea, immediately feeling desperate and needy and pathetic, I already knew that she wouldn’t answer and that it didn’t matter. What matters is that I still wanted to be her friend, and that she didn’t want to be my friend anymore.
The real why question is why do I want to be in a relationship with someone, anyone, who doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me? So often, I only think of this in terms of romantic relationships, but as I’ve gone through periods of estrangement in family relationships and friendships, I realize it applies everywhere.
A few months ago, my youngest daughter told me about how much she misses her former best friend and that it feels almost like a break-up. And I said, yes. Yes, it does. Because it is. Who says breakups and heartbreak are only for romantic relationships?
Friendship breakups hurt as much, sometimes more.
Sometimes you can see the break coming for a long time. Sometimes it feels sudden, but I think it rarely is.
There is no specific point in time when a cucumber is pickled sufficiently to be considered a pickle. Fermenting cucumbers into pickles can take anywhere from days to weeks to months, but the process is gradual. There is no one moment when the cucumber turns into a pickle, but once it does, there is no going back to being a cucumber.
Maybe this happens in relationships, too. Friendships or otherwise. The cucumber-ship is sitting in a jar of pickling juice, and nothing can stop the process. Inevitably, the cucumber-ship will turn into a pickle-ship. I don’t mean all relationships will break up. I mean all relationships will change, evolve, transform.
So many times, in so many ways, with so many relationships and people, I’ve wanted to reverse the pickling process. I desperately wanted to go back to cucumber. I knew it was pointless and impossible, but I still tried so long and so hard with so many pickle-ships.
My daughters love the song “For Good” from the musical Wicked, and I’ve heard the school choir sing it every year. It’s incredibly sappy, and it never fails to make me cry.
And now whatever way our stories end
I know you have re-written mine
By being my friend
Who can say if I've been changed for the better? But
Because I knew you
Because I knew you
I have been changed for good
There is no way to say if a cucumber turning into a pickle is a change for the better. But it is a change for good.
There’s no going back.
So I stood in the checkout lane with my jar of pickles and quietly inside my salty little heart I told my friend how much I loved her, and how sorry I was, and how much I hoped she was happy.
Last workshop of the season—hope you join Tess and me! If the image doesn’t link correctly, go HERE to learn more about the class.
Thank you for writing this. I have a friend like this. She was in my wedding for my marriage that ended. I was obsessed with the why for a long time. Sometimes I send her emails hoping for a response but it never comes. I’ve burned letters to release myself from her. And written her countless unsent emails. Maybe I’ll make a folder like you did. But mostly I want to be done being sad about it. My dad always told me the opposite of love isn’t hate. It is indifference. And I find that an impossible destination. But I keep trying.
Thank you for sharing this. And I’m glad we are friends. Maybe even funeral friends. Definitely camp friends. ❤️❤️❤️
This line--"The cucumber-ship is sitting in a jar of pickling juice, and nothing can stop the process." Lovely and vulnerable.