When a Gay Friendship Ends, the Grief Is Bigger Than the Friendship
For a lot of us, close friends weren’t supplemental. They were structural. The loss knows the difference even when we don’t.
You didn’t hear about the divorce from him.
You heard about it at a party, six weeks after it happened, from someone who assumed you already knew. And you stood there with a drink in your hand doing the math.
The diagnosis, three years ago, where he was the first person you called. Before your partner, before your family. The time he sat outside the hospital waiting room for four hours because you asked him to and he just did. The fights you’d had, the things you’d said out loud to him that you haven’t said to anyone else since.
Six weeks. A party. Someone else’s mouth.
You drove home doing that specific kind of arithmetic where you keep getting the same answer but keep checking the sum because the answer doesn’t make sense.
You thought you were load-bearing. You were not.
The friendship is over. You’re not sure he knows it’s over.
That bewilderment, the gap between what you thought the friendship was and what it turned out to be under actual pr…