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When my phone rang that early April morning, I instinctively knew that it was the call.
"I'm ENGAGED!" shrieked the voice on the line.
I couldn't help but smile. It was Caitlin, my confidante and partner of inane crimes. After a near decade of anticipation, her college sweetheart had popped the question.
"Finally!" I thought to myself, relieved for her sake and mine. I was thrilled.
"I wanted you to be the first to know! I know it's early so I'll fill you in on the details later. I'm putting my maid-of-honour straight to work!"
That, in essence, is how the new chapter of our friendship began: she as the bride and I as her maid-of-honour. I wasn't exactly sure what this role entailed, but I couldn't say no. Caitlin and I were nearly sisters. Despite having only four years tucked under our friendship belt, we were inseparable.
It helped that we were of the same mould. Both in our 20s, we were ambitious spirits who discovered each other while enduring long hours and ruthless competition in the work place. The demands of our 12-hour days revealed the best and worst in us, making friendships such as ours a rarity. In a sea of black authoritative suits, we were the pink in each other's days – a refreshing reminder that there was more to life than the everyday challenges that otherwise overwhelmed us. Whenever we were together, we remembered to exhale, to breathe.
Our lunch hours became the midday escape that truly established us as allies. After a meal at our go-to restaurant, a mandatory stop at a shoe store became part of a silly ritual.
In between slipping our feet into gold sandals or wobbling on five-inch stilettos, we'd attempt to make sense of our world. While assessing shoe colours and heels, we figured out our lives.
When one of us fell into an Unjustifiable Shopping Purchase, then the other was obligated to ask "No regrets?" If those two words were uttered back without hesitation, then all was good in our world. All was right.
After Caitlin's engagement, it was a natural for these lunch hours to morph into wedding-planning sessions. She wasn't kidding about immediately putting me to work. I accompanied her to appointments with designers and obsessed about everything, from the colour motif of the wedding to the verbiage on invites.
While not entirely stress-free, it was a joyous time. Unable to contain my excitement, I already had my gift for the bride a mere two weeks after the engagement: I commissioned a shoemaker to craft Caitlin's version of the perfect pair of wedding shoes.
The flurry of activity was surreal to me as it must have been for Caitlin. Here we were suddenly scripting this fairy-tale ending. It was the biggest day of my friend's life – one that I felt was, if only for a moment, also mine.
When the frenzy of wedding planning had settled, it seemed the reality of marriage descended on us more fully, with both of us silently wondering how it would impact our lives. In the stillness of those days, we suddenly noticed the "what now?" cloud hovering above us, the looming shadow of change.
Change, at the onset, crept in kindly. Our conversations were merely peppered with banter on Caitlin's non-existent homemaking abilities or the marriage-imposed curfew that would shorten our cocktail hours. While all very trite and shallow, maybe it was our way of recognizing that the ground we both stood on was shifting.
Eventually, tackling issues on parenting, family life and career sacrifices found its way into our conversations, consuming us in ways we had never imagined. Life became about figuring out how to run a household given our current income levels. In a blink of an eye, the trip to the shoe store was stripped from our daily agenda, having lost its place in life's new order of priorities.
Over our get-togethers, I listened to Caitlin. I sympathized with her on her new worries and cheered her on for new dreams – but not entirely without feeling as if I had lost my place in this new world of hers. As the wedding date drew nearer, this dissonance between us became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Whenever I expressed my own hopes and fears, or dwelt on familiar matters that once bound our friendship, I couldn't help but feel dismissed by Caitlin. I sensed an impatience that neither her words nor actions could hide.
In turn, perhaps I, too, could no longer mask my growing disinterest in the responsibilities Caitlin had to contend with.
We tried to get past these shortcomings. The polite accommodation of our differences only seemed patronizing and disingenuous. There was no meeting halfway. If there was, I no longer knew how to get there.
Over time, our friendship slowly degenerated into hallway run-ins and uncomfortable phone conversations.
When Caitlin's wedding invite arrived in the mail, enclosed was a card bearing the names of the wedding party. I discovered sadly, but with little surprise, that I was no longer her maid-of-honour.
In my hand was an invitation to a quiet exit, a gentle farewell from her life. We no longer had a role in each other's future. That was now clear to me. That, too, was what my tears were for.
I chose to miss Caitlin's wedding, deciding that my absence would spare us both from the awkwardness of it all. She did write to tell me, however, that her wedding shoes turned out lovely. "Thank you," she wrote. "I danced all night!" It made me smile.
Even now, a decade later, I struggle with the fact that a friendship as treasured as ours had managed to unravel. We were confronted with life evolving and sometimes – oftentimes – that entails loss. Perhaps one can only hope to handle such change with compassion and with honesty, if not with grace.
Although I miss her, there is complete contentment in the years we celebrated together. No regrets whatsoever. None at all.
Carissa Duenas lives in Toronto.