The Yellow Sweater: Words for My Best Friend
By: Larkyn Simony
Tags: Sad, Friendship, Losing A Friend, Best Friend, Grief

The Yellow Sweater: Words for My Best Friend

You were a welcome respite from years of wandering through a desert of disconnection Larkyn Simony Jan 19, 2020·3 min read

Photo by the author

I have this yellow sweater. I don’t know if you remember it or not. Actually, yellow may not be the best way to describe the color; the words goldenrod or sunflower might be more accurate. I wore my yellow sweater to work last week, even though I knew I shouldn’t. It has ink spots on the sleeve from when I didn’t notice the ink on a greeting card wasn’t dry and I dragged the sleeve through it. Though I tried, that ink never would come out. The seams of my yellow sweater are coming apart. It, like me, has seen better days.

But I wore my yellow sweater to work anyway. It’s the kind of thing I’d normally throw away. It endured a final rip at work last week which has rendered it unusable, yet I can’t get rid of it. It sits on my desk and reminds me of you. It is the sweater I wore the day we met, and if I throw it away, then I am throwing away everything there ever was or ever will be between us. That’s what I tell myself.

You were my best friend. Maybe because I needed a best friend, even though I’ve never been a best friend kind of girl. Maybe because we got along so well from the beginning. We first encountered each other on a dating site and, when we met, the day I wore that yellow sweater, we argued our way through half the dinner. We were so similar in ways that made dating a terrible idea, and so different in ways that made dating a terrible idea, that we decided to give dating a try.

After a very brief, and very awkward attempt at dating, you finally said what was true: We’d make much better friends than we did romantic partners. You said as friends we could be in each other’s lives forever, until we were old and couldn’t walk without assistance. I knew you were right, but I figured that, like most times men and women say they will be friends after failed romantic dalliances, we’d never see each other again. To my great surprise, we did see each other again one day the next week. And the day after that, and most of the days after that.

We spent almost all of our free time together. You were working on a PhD, which was grueling and not always satisfying work. Maybe I was a good distraction from your work and your studies. Maybe I was an escape. I never considered that might be the role I played in your life, until one day I did. Yet, in spite of all the things I learned about you and about how you don’t get close to people, you allowed me in. You allowed us to become close; you allowed me to see you as you really were. You were my best friend, until one day you weren’t.

For me, you were a welcome respite from years of wandering through a desert of disconnection from myself, the world, and other people. An incorrect mental-health diagnosis, and being wrongly medicated made closeness with other people impossible for me, even though not being close to people is the opposite of who I truly am.

In spite of my strong desire to say you used me, and to say you never cared, in my heart I think you did care. A lot. I know you did. But knowing you did makes it much harder than thinking I was nothing more more important to you than a Netflix binge or a night of drinking that made you forget all your stresses. I still tell myself I never really did matter to you. If I never mattered to you, life makes a lot more sense And if I tell myself that enough, I might believe it. If I tell myself that enough, I might start living life again, instead of crying into this ragged, unsightly, broken, yellow sweater.