Between the Lines

Although bright and sunny outside, it was a dark day when the texts flew back and forth that made our friendship trip and falter and sprawl like a centipede that had forgotten how to organise forward motion for each of those hundred tiny feet.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Mine the fault, mine the fault, mine the most grievous fault.

Though I hadn’t seen the inside of a Catholic church for years except when attending essential family events and that one Christmas Midnight Mass when I was dating a devout Roman Catholic, the old Latin words often surfaced in my mind since that day.

But even if I wasn’t what my colleague called a Recovering Catholic, I couldn’t seek out the nearest confessional, enter one of those narrow booths that my Lutheran father once compared to upright coffins, and murmur my sins through the grill to the priest.

I didn’t need God to forgive me, though I felt sure that God would understand.

I needed my friend to let go of those apparently unforgiveable words that I had texted out of concern and worry on a day when I was surrounded by a swarm of my own worries.

The spider of time continued to spin her convoluted web, but her silken strands could not conceal the moment when I realised that my best friend stopped trusting me. Like a fly secured with sticky ropes, this thought kept buzzing and stirring in a very palpable way.

Even when I was laughing with another friend or basking in the sunshine on my favorite bench immersed in nature, I kept remembering the original incident, linking along the strands of the web all that had followed after.

We still spoke, but nowhere near as freely as before. I didn’t always accept a texted invitation to chat. I felt sure that she also ignored my invites sometimes. Probably we both didn’t create opportunities for each other as often as we used to do.

When we talked, I was treading carefully in a minefield made up of eggshells while she was playing a mean hand of Poker, concealing most of her cards from my view, the bad ones as well as the good ones. This hurt, as previously we had floated together on the stream of consciousness whenever we had a chance to catch up, rehashing the past, commiserating or celebrating the present, and dreading or dreaming the future.

And though I could imagine sitting down with her face-to-face and thrashing the whole thing out, beginning with a grovelling apology on my part, financial constraints and my own commitments near to home kept me from even suggesting this.

The last word on the topic was that we would have to agree to differ.

I didn’t even know who had typed that into our mutual chat, though I suspected it was me. I felt like I had slammed a door shut which could never be opened again.

After obsessively scrolling through that explosive exchange of texts for most of Friday evening, as often as possible on Saturday and all too frequently on Sunday, trying desperately to read between the lines, I deleted our chat history an hour after midnight on Monday when I decided I had to leave it behind for the sake of my own sanity.

Except, obviously, it had not been as easy as that.

I suspected she might have done the same, given that she asked me to send again a photo of my latest artwork which she said she had somehow lost, blaming technology. Of course, she was hardly a technological wizard like me, so it wasn’t impossible she had pressed delete when she meant to save or forward the image.

Who else did I know who still owned, maintained and actually used a typewriter in this day and age? I remembered fondly that she had contributed a plethora of physically typed words for me to use in a collage which attracted a lot of attention and jump-started my flagging career as an artist.

I missed our previous closeness and how we spoke a sort of shorthand as just a handful of words conjured up a whole episode from the past, hers or mine or shared.

When we chatted, I asked her open-ended questions, but for the most part, she pushed these aside. How she said it varied, but almost always, she excluded me with comments like: Oh, there’s nothing to write home about. Same old, same old. I’m glad I got through last week and would rather look forward than waste time looking over my shoulder.

If she shared anything with me, it was a summary without details. If I tried to raise the topic on which we had agreed to differ, she simply shrugged it off with a comment that sounded like she rehearsed the words beforehand.

Whereas before, receiving a text or image from her had lifted my mood so I would click instantly if I could, now each notification made me sink deeper into the gloom, sometimes not even looking at whatever she sent for several hours.

During this uncomfortable period which almost felt like mourning a ruined relationship, I spoke to—and hung up on—another friend who took her side which felt like yet another betrayal.

Then, after nursing my jangled feelings for more than a few days, I shared what had happened with a different friend who provided a listening ear and compassionate words in a quiet corner of a local tea room we often frequented. I felt sure it helped that we were occupying the same physical space rather than communicating through our mobile phones.

“I’m willing to bet,” he said, “that if you had a conversation on that day rather than all the texting back and forth, the outcome would have been different.”

I sighed and agreed before taking another sip of my cooling tea.

“In the Catholic faith, would you say that confession is like making an apology to God?”

I had to think about that. For lack of sleep due to being alienated from someone who had previously been so much a part of my life, my brain wasn’t working at its best. “I suppose so,” I told him, “though I never thought of it that way.”

“To carry the analogy forward,” he continued, “maybe what she needs is an apology.”

“But how can I apologise when she won’t talk to me in any meaningful way? I have deeper conversations with my new colleague about life, the universe and everything.”

He opened both hands, palm upwards. “That’s for you to figure out, but I’m sure you will.”

This took time but eventually, I decided to be straightforward and direct, which was well outside my comfort zone. When the next chance to speak to her arose, I didn’t wait for her to choose a direction for our conversation.

“I’m sorry,” I said, then waited through the ensuing silence, wondering if my words had gotten lost in the ether and the call would terminate which sometimes happened because her mobile phone was so antiquated.

“What?” she asked.

I had to swallow the lump in my throat before I could repeat myself. “I’m sorry.”

Suspended again in a conversational gap, I worried that I had made a big mistake. I had often thought that bringing up that day when we had agreed to differ was the last thing that would help us reconcile.

Finally, she spoke slowly. “I never thought you would apologise.”

I felt like the absolutely worst friend in the entire world, so I ended up saying, “I’m so sorry for misunderstanding you.”

“Okay,” she said with a catch in her voice, “don’t wear out the apology.”

I gave a choked laugh and nodded, realised she couldn’t see me and said, “Okay.”

As we made tentative inroads on having a real conversation, a feeling that I can only call grace came over me, soothing my frazzled mind and easing my jumbled heart as well.

Grace or maybe love, I guess.

The bricks with which both of us, in our doubt and confusion, had been stacking to make a wall between us gradually turned into planks for rebuilding the bridge that connected us.

Bruised but brave, the centipede untangled those hundred tiny legs and plodded on again though at a noticeably slower pace than before.