Since the age of 12, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating relationships and the roles different people play in my life. That sounds a little crazy for someone that young, but it’s just something that I have always pondered. What makes one relationship close while another is distant, and what distinguishes an acquaintance from a friend? For a lot of people, particularly in today’s social media driven world where we “friend” everyone on Facebook as soon as we meet them and then immediately forget about them and think this is “normal,” there really isn’t a huge distinction between “acquaintance” and “friend,” and I’ve always found that a bit tragic. We consume ourselves with knowing people superficially and pretend in our heads that we have lots of “friends” – but those relationships are empty in the long run (e.g. when someone in your family dies, do you expect all your Facebook “friends” to send their condolences and come to your relative’s funeral?). I’ve always hated it, and maybe for that reason, I am guarded when it comes to labeling people my “friends,” and even more protective over those whom I would call “close.” I’ve been accused of being overly judgmental and too cautious, both of which have their bits of truth, but the bottom line is that I refuse to live a superficial life. I refused at age 12. I am still refusing at age 27.5. I want meaningful relationships with people I respect who genuinely, deeply care about me. Is that so much to ask? A lot of the time, it feels like it.

So, that’s why I have this recent conundrum, in which I have a colleague who is trying to befriend me, and I’m doing my best to keep my distance as much as possible without being rude. It’s not as though I never gave her a chance. Shortly after I started, she started at my office, and she asked me to lunch. I went to lunch with her, and for the first time ever, immediately got a sour taste in my mouth, and concluded this wasn’t going to work. The odd thing about this happening is that I rarely have lasting first impressions with anyone. In fact, most of the time when I first meet people, my first impression is neutral, and then as I spend more time with her, I realize gradually whether or not we mesh.

If we were to be friends, it’s almost as though I’d be violating my morals. She has a child who is over one, who spends Monday through Friday with her in-laws, days and evenings. She and her husband go over for dinner in the evenings, which her in-laws cook (they even pack them lunch for work!). She and her husband are basically child-free Monday through Friday with the exception of spending ‘family dinner’ time in the evenings with their daughter, and then on the weekends, they finally are parents and take care of their child. She constantly talks about wanting to do things like cook and sign up for a gym and go running, but insists that it’s too difficult with so little time working full-time and being a mom. What is wrong with that statement?

I can’t be around people who make people of my generation look lazy and as though they are not taking full responsibility for the life choices they have made. Ed might get mad at me and start scolding me the next time he visits me in a dream for this, but “I feel what I feel.” I need to surround myself with people who are proactively trying to do things to make their lives better, not dumping their responsibilities on other people and then lamenting that the world is unfair and that they don’t have time for (fill in the blank).

Then in my head, sometimes I think, “You think your life is hard? Did your sibling just commit suicide?” It’s a mean but easy card to pull if I really have to.

Yesterday night, I went to a Bodhi Meditation Meetup. It’s the second meditation Meetup I’ve attended in the last month; the first one was a Sahaja meditation, which I found a bit boring. Bodhi meditation was a bit different and instead focuses on visualization. One of the things we had to visualize was standing still and being nearly transparent atop a crystal lotus. As I closed my eyes and began to imagine this in my head, the image of Ed walking around the crystal lotus appeared, and he tried to step on the lotus I was standing on. I got really distracted at this point and decided to leave the room. I ended up leaving 15 minutes before the class was supposed to end. Who would’ve thought that attending a meditation class would leave me feeling even more distressed.

He’s just everywhere, even in the meditation room with me.

Today, I had a routine check up for my annual physical, so I had the usual fun things done that all women love – weight and blood pressure check, breast exam, and pelvic exam. For the first time while getting my breasts examined, my gynecologist says to me, “Has anyone in your family had breast cancer?” Well, that’s never a good question. My answer was negative. She points out two parts of my breasts where she can feel what appears to be “fibrous bundles,” but since it’s always better to be safe than sorry, she noted on a diagram where she felt the bundles and wrote me a referral to see a radiologist for a breast ultrasound.

My first thought when I hear this is, that’s just great. I could have fibrous bundles, or cysts, or even tiny tumors developing in my breasts now. She insisted that I shouldn’t worry and that I should be fine, but the next thought in my mind was, if this is actually malignant, what would that be like for my parents to know that their son recently committed suicide and their daughter could possibly have breast cancer…?

In the last few months, I’ve spent a good amount of time talking with my best friends, sharing my feelings, conversations and situations that have arisen with family and relatives (both helpful and destructive), and things I have been doing to give myself an outlet for my emotions and to help myself cope. It’s strange, though, how two people can judge your healing process in two very different and opposing ways.

I’ve seen my best friend in New York at least once a month since Ed left us. Every time I see her, we always debrief on the same things – what I’ve been thinking about, inane situations with my parents and extended family, what I’ve been occupying myself with. In assessing my progression in the last few months, she said to me, “You’re coping really well. You seem a little happier every time I see you.”

Then there’s my best friend in San Francisco, who I saw once in September when I was back home, and spoken on the phone and over Google Hangout with a number of times since July. She seems to think that I am miserable and “the same,” as she told her friend who asked about me, She is urging me constantly to see a therapist, which I am considering but have honestly been putting off.

I tell both of these friends the same things, so how are they both coming to two different conclusions about my grieving “status”?

Ed, how do you think I am doing?

Sleep is usually rest time, unless you are tormented in your dreams by the people who left you.

I had a slew of dreams last night that blurred into one another. In one dream, it is Christmas day at Chris’s aunt and uncle’s house, and he proposes to me in front of his entire family. While I am excited, I am not particularly pleased with the solitaire diamond ring he has presented to me (that sounds terrible – I know. I’m so ungrateful apparently). After the initial chaos, I calm down and am deciding who to phone first to tell the big news of our engagement. While thinking about it, I draw a blank. I want to call no one.

Then, I remember coming home to my parents’ house to see Ed curled up in a ball on the living room floor. I run up to him, happy to see him, and I bend down and put my arms around him to hug him and have him hug me back. He gets up, breaks out of my grasp, and starts running. I start chasing after him, calling out his name, and he keeps running faster and faster. It is then noticeable that we are no longer running in our house but in some long, bright hallway, and the hallway doesn’t seem to have an end. I won’t give up, and I continue running after him, despite my awareness that I will never catch up to him. He always was a fast runner.

I have lost. I will never catch up to him.

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night again like I did the week that Ed left us. I woke up at around 3:15, disturbed because I had some odd dreams. In one dream, I run into Ben, a friend here in New York, and he has told me that his partner, Grant, who I went to high school with, has suddenly died. In the next dream, I am sitting in a large theater, and I am the only person sitting in the audience, right in the center. As I look up to the stage, I see what appears to be a set for a house with multiple rooms. The people who are on stage are Ed and my parents, and they are going about their usual daily routine, unaware that they have an audience (me) watching them. Although they are all busy, none of them speaks to each other at all. It is as though their existences are completely unlinked from the other and that they are unaware of the others’ presences.

Needless to say, it was weird to see my family all on a stage, doing their daily activities and not interacting with each other at all. It made me feel so alienated. That’s probably how Ed felt. He had a family with whom he lived, yet despite that, he felt little to no connection to them because of his profound depression and mental illness. He couldn’t understand them, and they couldn’t even fathom the thought of beginning to understand them. Having this dream makes me feel even more disconnected from him now.

Tonight, I had dinner with a friend I’ve had for the last two years. We haven’t seen each other since the beginning of June. I was actually supposed to have dinner with him the Wednesday of the week that Ed passed away (that was a Monday, but it was confirmed on Tuesday), but I obviously canceled and told him over text that my brother was gone. He sent me a brief text to let me know he was sorry and if there was anything he could do, to let him know.

Since then, the only communication we’ve really had is when I’ve sent out mass e-mails with him on it about Ed’s service details, a copy of the eulogy I gave, and an online album of our childhood photos together. I wasn’t really in the mood to contact anyone proactively since I have been back, and so he finally contacted me a week ago to see if I was free for dinner.

Tonight, he never asked once about my brother or what happened. Am I supposed to think he was being sensitive to the topic and was waiting for me to bring it up, or am I supposed to think he doesn’t care to know? Or, am I supposed to think that we aren’t that close, so why would he even want to know?