We Couldn't Get There Any Faster

When the small bag of fast food tater tots ricocheted off his friend's shoulder, he knew before the crispy morsels hit the floor that their friendship was over. Pride, confusion, outrage, indignation... all coalescing into the ending of what had been a lengthy friendship rooted in their shared childhoods. 

If there were words exchanged in the moments following, he doesn't remember them. Only that his friend went one way, he went the other, and their paths have not crossed again over the past decade.

My experience of this man as a mentor is so different--I know him to be even-tempered, communicative, fair--that I have a hard time reconciling these two characters as one. 

When I inquire as to what would drive him to this angry precipice, he says there isn't any one issue he can recall. It was just months of frustration at his friend's inconsiderate behavior; frustration he let go unexpressed until it all came crashing out in that one fateful moment.

I confess to him I have a hard time imagining him as the person he is describing.

I wouldn't handle it that way now, he concedes. But back then it didn't occur to me to handle my growing frustration differently. Or at all. Before it got to that point. Maybe I thought I didn't have a right, maybe I didn't want to be seen as no fun or as weak, maybe I was afraid my needs would be met with ridicule or with rejection. 

Whatever anger must have led to the exchange, I do not see it reflected in his eyes now, ten or more years later. I wonder aloud if he ever wishes he had handled it differently.

I lacked the experience to handle it differently, he tells me. But losing that friendship the way I did is why I have never lost another one that way. Maybe that was the point.

He continued, You don't know what you don't know until you know. And, once you do, you have to find a way to forgive yourself for not knowing it sooner.