by Melanie Lowe

Created on: November 19, 2008

Everyday I wake up full of good intentions. My mind is busy before my body has had a chance to catch up. I've already planned exactly how it will happen and when and what I'll do and then my body catches up and somehow, between the bedroom and the kitchen, it's convinced my mind that it simply CAN'T. Before I know it another whole day has passed with me looking through her trying very hard to pretend she isn't even there.

It's not so easy, that big elephant in the room. Picture this, somewhat similar, scenario: You have a friend that you were close to for many years at school. After school, she went to Varsity; you joined a band and tried to start a music career. She got married and thought about having kids, you had one failed relationship after another. You're both living in different worlds and yet you both feel obliged to meet for coffee and talk about inane things because your own, real lives, don't have any bearing on each other. It's an unspoken agreement that you don't EVER talk about the differences, the lack of actual interest in each other lives or the fact that, actually, you'd both rather be getting on with those lives than sitting there, talking across the surface of them to try and hold on to a friendship that, you're beginning to think, really should've been given a decent burial on the last day of school. If you'd only broach the subject, and take things to a deeper level, you'd realise you both have the same fears and the big elephant in the room becomes a little mouse, or even better, it ceases to breathe altogether.

This is the situation I am in with someone I once loved with all my heart. The once "object of my affection", who always spoke the same language as me, has become a stranger and I can't help wondering if it's my fault or hers. Perhaps it's both of us. You see, one day, she failed me. I had a story to tell, weighing heavily on my heart and she was the one friend who always listened and always gave me such good advice and I knew, if anyone was going to understand me, she was. Until that day. I poured my heart out, I plucked at her heart strings, then I beat them in anger, then I stroked them coercively, all to no avail. She wouldn't listen. She refused to hear.

Naturally I lost a little faith in her. I punished her for a few days until I thought she'd learned her lesson. Again I sat her down and tried to explain how I was feeling and again she refused to acknowledge it. This time I hardly tried. I merely got up and walked away. There

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