As a child I was dismayed each time one of my father’s closest friends, bright, colorful people my sister and I enjoyed very much, was permanently banished from our lives.   “The fall from grace,” my mother would say, “is swift and absolute.”  People we were very fond of one day just disappeared, and it always aggrieved me.  My father always had his compelling reason why the last straw had been placed on the friendship, exactly how the despicable true face of the formerly beloved friend finally revealed itself.

I argued with him about the importance of forgiveness.  It was not lost on me that this forgiveness would also apply to me.  In my father’s view I had always fought him, even as an infant, when I stared from my crib with dark, accusing eyes even before I could speak.  He made a far less insane case for each of these people he once loved being unworthy of his affections, for the betrayal each had committed.  In only one case did I ever get to hear the other side of the story, and her case seemed at least as plausible and reasonable as my father’s did.  I have since come to write this woman off for much the same reason my father had decades earlier.

The point is, live long enough and you may see things from a previously incomprehensible perspective.   As a child it was unthinkable to me that a person could toss away a good friend and never look back.   As an adult I have done this many times, always in the spirit of not tolerating what I come to perceive as ill treatment or abuse.  It does not please me to say this.   I hold forgiveness high in my esteem, though it’s super-humanly hard to forgive someone who insists they did nothing wrong.  I would rather have all of the friends I once held dear.  In each case, though, I came to the impasse my father had come to during my childhood, the impasse I found impossible to understand then.    

It is the moment when one sees a destructive pattern in the relationship, feels a lack of empathy that quickly becomes mutual.   The other person believes that you are the asshole, you just as fervently believe that they are the asshole.  That you may both be assholes no longer gives consolation to either party.   The air in the closed room begins to stink.  All that remains is a senseless fight in a stinking room or a move toward the door.  Outside the stinking room, walking away, there is little reason for nostalgia or even curiosity about whether the place still stinks.  It’s just time to move forward into the fresh air.