The Grass is Always Greener

Friendships: Losing a Friend

It’s August and I’m in Japan. 

The days have been full of perfect meals (a rare compliment from me), walking miles and miles, and weaving in and out of stores and tourist sites and streets. My time in Japan is wrapped in a coating of nostalgia, remnants of my childhood sprouting up as surprises throughout the city. I spent a long chapter of my childhood being obsessed with anime, Japanese culture, and at one point even wanted to desperately go to high school here. 

One afternoon, Sadie and I are walking across the city to go to Yoyogi Park. We’ve been traveling for weeks with our other best friends that we met studying abroad a few years ago. Now, it’s just the two of us as we visit one of our friends living in Tokyo and we’ve fallen into a comfortable rhythm. 

My body is tired, my mind is not home, and the summer heat in Japan feels like I am swimming through its heat waves but ultimately drowning in sweat everyday. Time differences and the endless choices of being able to do whatever I want has dulled my decision making, especially after weeks of actively backpacking. It’s that period in a trip where I have no words, no ability to make a choice, and no will to do much but a need to do something. I am in Japan after all. 

When we arrive at the park, the patches of sunlight weaving through the trees paint everyone’s skin a flushed golden. It’s a little before sunset and I am convinced the sun shines in a different tone here. I mean, I’m sure it has to do with the architecture, reflection, and Japan’s overall location. 

Here, it’s this warm but almost gentle hazy type of orange with a beige undertone. Golden hour in Japan feels like one of those indie films where the overall lighting is artistically altered to offer a melancholic but ultimately warm glow. Maybe it’s the whimsical part of me that sees this, maybe I genuinely view the world with rose-colored lenses but instead in different hues of the orange and yellow that the sun tends to be. I remember trying to take a video to explain the differences in sunlight to someone in the future, but looking back at the video myself now, the sunshine looks like…well, nothing special. My argument is that you can’t trust phone cameras since it’s the same camera that makes the moon look like a white dot in the sky.

We reach a wide open field of lush green grass. There is a friend group having a photo shoot and gleeful screams of kids in the distance. The sun begins to sink as Sadie parks herself under a street light to read A Little Life and I decide to plop myself farther down in the middle of the field. It feels refreshing to exist in the center of a vast field with a view only of the wide sky and acres of trees. A deep sigh escapes me as I fall into the warm grass.

I plug in my airpods, lean back, and spread like a star across the grass. I don’t know this yet but tomorrow, I’ll wake up with a million pink bites on my ass and my friends and I will have a panicked hour deciding if I should go to the hospital in case it’s an allergic reaction and then spend another hour stripping our bedsheets and backpacks in full belief that there are bed bugs. It’ll turn out to just be grass fleas, which have now made it up my list of enemies. 

The indigo clouds tinged with night roll over and a summer sunset swallows the sky. My chest buds with the familiar fondness of being alive. My heart swells in gratitude for this moment. 

I am anchored here to this ground, looking at the sky, pinned in the moment. 

I have been feeling homesick as I’ve been on the road since June and even for me, I am learning my boundaries amidst the whiplashes of my travels. The nostalgic feel of Japan feels like a warm hug from my childhood and a reminder of how places that I believed would always be distant dreams are in fact right here as reality, underneath me right now. I move my arms up and down in the grass like a snow angel, letting each finger prickle with blades of grass. (The grass fleas are enjoying me for dinner as I’m having my dramatic moment.)

A certain sadness has seeped into the undertone of my day without warning. Being so tired, I am fragile against its entrance prodding inside my chest. When the moment of happiness passes like the clouds that I stare at, I remember it is someone’s birthday today. 

An old best friend. 

I haven’t thought of this person in a while. Without fail, birthdays jolt me back like a sweater catching on a corner or hair snagged on a necklace.

Happy birthday, I had wished earlier that day through text. 

Laying in the grass, my eyes gloss over. I picture this friend if it had worked out. A tearful speech at my potential wedding, coffees catching up throughout adulthood, their appearance scattered throughout my twenties and way after through trips and phone calls and hugs. My mind can only generate a vision of who they were last time I’d seen them, years ago. The montage of past memories and possible futures collapse together like the teeth of a zipper until a single short line stares back at me now.

Thank you, the reply text reads. 

Two best friends now reduced to two blue and silver message bubbles that bounce back and forth depending on whose birthday, and two people that exist nowhere else now except inside this annual polite exchange.

Friend breakups are one of the most heartbreaking mysteries I’ve ever endured. Mysteries because you know why it didn’t work and sometimes you don’t, but that never stops questions from ringing.

When I lose a close friend, I lose my mind.

…I’m working on it.

At my core, I’m very logical. I understand relationships do–almost must–change throughout your life. Friendships, lovers, even family can shift and these changes are crucial to proving your own evolution and the passage of time. It’s healthy to outgrow people and for people to outgrow you. Some are chapters and lessons, some are stretched into forever. I understand this, I do. 

The reasons I lose my mind: 

• I can’t let anyone out who’s ever been let in (ever)

• No matter what, you never get the same person twice not even yourself

• Fears of rejection and abandonment and the curse of being unloved 

• Loneliness  

• The tug of war against aging/growing, it wins every time

I know people and I know them well, but in long-term relationships, I am rocked and drowned back and forth like a ship torn at sea. It is not something I can control and something I cannot control myself in and this drives me to every edge. 

Admiring this moment in Yoyogi park on blades of grass I worked so hard to get to, my sadness is simply the other part of the double-edged sword of being here. I’m here, present and feeling the empirical evidence of my dreams coming into fruition. I made it, I know I did. Just as quick, I feel this profound absence that kicks me in the gut. 

I’m happy. Why aren’t the people who led me to this moment here to share it with? I think as the night has taken over the sky completely.  

I am watching a beautiful sunset in my beautiful life. A sunset maybe years ago I didn’t think I’d get to see, in a country I never thought I’d actually get to, an age I never thought of turning a while ago. It’s supposed to be a beautiful moment and it’s mine to have. 

In the past few years, I’ve lost two close friends that if I let my thoughts breathe, my eyes will begin to prickle in pain and the tears are too eager to arrive. It sounds like they’re gone, but they’re very much alive, just somewhere in the world as strangers. This is the cruelest reality of it all.

These were laps I sobbed in, hair brushed back until I sank into my exhaustion and slept. Breakfast chats and texts of precise random details of our day and making each other laugh. The only other pairs of eyes who witnessed exact milestones and mishaps in this grand coming-of-age we all go through. Dimensions of my identity made comprehensive and real by people who could translate their own in conjoinment. All those conversations of where we’d be in a few years, our vibrant and different dreams. No one told us we wouldn’t get to share them together. 

It’s funny because in both of these major relationships, I felt the end months before it happened. My intuition tucked my hair behind my ear and softly let me down. It’s not good for you anymore. I brushed it away, stood in front of the dead plant and continued to water it.

I sit in the palm of my dream being lived in real time, wondering if the price to pay for this was to let those relationships go. The worst part is I know it is. If I had held onto the people I loved, no matter how deeply, there is a hidden sequence that the universe follows that would have been disrupted. Everything happened, needed to happen, to bring me here. To this version of myself, to these dreams, to let the people I let go to equally find their rightful selves and lives. To deny either myself or them or the greater universe of better is not right.

Doing what is right no matter the cost is what keeps me sane and fills me with acceptance on most matters but especially this. I refuse to stand in the way of the greater workings of what is collectively good.

In the same exchange, I think of the new friends in my life I could have never imagined being best friends with. Opportunities and rooms filled with chances on people and chapters that I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise unless I had let the cards lay where they did. I think of best friends now who were waiting for me as much as I was waiting for someone like them. Versions of myself newly generated built off of the space these old friends left behind. 

Life isn’t necessarily better or worse, but it is the right one for me. No one is the hero or villain, we’re all just growing up and out. Sometimes, there isn’t even a big blowout. Just choices made by both until you’re here. Life rearranges and so do people, the order isn’t leaked to anyone, but it’s an order I trust. I have to.

There is so much I have experienced now that I will never risk for any “what if” or return to the past.

Most relationships that end and the space that follows is beneficial and almost essential for all parties involved. There are a million other realities that could have happened, but we’re in this one. We only get this one. That is what matters at the end of the day. 

Pain is something I am learning to be present and patient with. 

The killer of pain? Gratitude. Acceptance. A life you choose or whatever you rearrange it to be despite the unknown. 

Back in Yoyogi Park, I sit sprawled and close my eyes. I cry with both happiness and pain intertwined. Crying is a new thing I’m learning to do in 2023 as well. I let the pain sit but let my happiness and gratitude grow around it, there’s space for both. Life has grown quite big and colorful and fulfilling around these permanent bruises.

In my new relationship with pain where I don’t run or kill it immediately, I am learning how to take it in. I let the moment sit and for once, I let it go. My fingers let go, one claw mark at a time. 

A lesson among many that I am learning in my voyage across countries this summer is that the grass is always greener. No matter what you do, who you are, what you have, there is always grass that is greener. Something lost, something you crave. Something new, something you yearn for. Someone. There is always another dream, a person, or life in the blend of past and future. 

Water the grass where your feet are. Tend to the grass you are on. Be present where your feet are, so they can take you where you’re meant to move forward to. There are rooms waiting for you and open arms you’ll be surprised to melt in. You have no idea how big your life can grow if you let it, how good it can get. You’ll surprise yourself with your own evolution too. 

Find your peace and focus on your own life. The greatness lies in what you already have and what you are about to create for yourself.

The grass is always greener. Let it be greener. Let it be.

Enjoy who you are each time and enjoy the grass even if it prickles. Even if sometimes the grass will quite literally eat your ass.