theresa tender square when i was a little girl, i knew i was going to get married. when i was a little girl, i knew that i didn’t want to be a mother. when i got engaged for the first time at 26 and i shared this news with theresa, instead of congratulating me she responded, “wow. you must really want to get married.” when i was friends with theresa, she used to say to me constantly, “you say you don’t want kids but i have a feeling you’re going to change your mind,” as though she knew my body better than i did. guess which one of us has a kid now? (hint: it isn’t me.) * when i was working for “upfront magazine,” i used to write a shitty monthly column about myspace profiles featuring people from windsor that i’m not proud of (see “creation_myth”). theresa recommended the target for the last column i did, sending me information about a young woman she went to high school with who annoyed her. what was her gripe with this woman? theresa didn’t like that this former high school friend had a picture of herself posing seductively in a bikini on her profile. i took on the challenge on and humiliated this woman in print. afterward, the woman called theresa to find out how close we were when she saw that there was a facebook connection. theresa denied knowing me, saying we were only acquaintances that ran into one another at the radio station from time to time. theresa was my best fucking friend at the time. she didn’t have the fucking gall to tell this woman that she had, in fact, passed her name along to me to write the article. * there were several times in my twenties that i decided to give up drinking for my mental health. part of this was due to the fact that i realized alcoholism ran in my family and i didn’t like how much i was drawn to it. part of it was because each time my older sisters had binges that landed them in the hospital i drank as a way to deal with it, and i realized that was not a healthy coping mechanism. each time i communicated to theresa that i was not going to be drinking for the foreseeable future, her response to me was something along the lines of “well, that sucks because we really have a lot of fun together doing that.” i would last a few weeks and always go back to it, and theresa welcomed this return with open arms. * when we started developing themed dj dance parties at the loop, we decided we’d have a meeting with jay to make our case for moving us from thursday to friday night’s for our weekly slot. during our last 90’s dance party bash, theresa got hammered. when we approached jay at the end of the night to collect our payment, theresa confronted him and said “you need to give us friday’s! look at how many people we brought in tonight!” i was mortified. i started apologizing profusely to jay, who did not look the least bit impressed by theresa’s antics. she had completely sabotaged our plans to have a professional conversation with jay at a later date. that was one of the only times i ever called her out, telling her that her actions had consequences that affected me the following day. * there were times i let theresa convince me to get involved with men that i wasn’t really interested in because i thought she was looking out for me. there was a friend of james’s who she suggested i have a one-night stand with after my heart had been broken by a relationship with a man who was terrible for me. i had never felt more empty in my life after that encounter in my apartment. (theresa never liked my ex; in fact, there was a time that she said that he stunk, in front of him while she was drunk, because he used natural deodorant. “i don’t think your friend likes me very much,” he said to me. “no, no, no,” i assured him. “she’s just had too much to drink.”) then there was the time she recommended i start dating her cousin, jason, which was one of the weirdest non-relationships i’ve ever experienced. he told me had lung cancer and not to tell anyone, so i didn’t (not even to theresa). i would go to his house and he would fall asleep on me while we watched tv for hours in the afternoon claiming he was tired from chemo. he never let me into his bedroom and he never let me take off his shirt when we kissed. looking back, i’ve wondered if he was heroin addict who hid it from everyone. * during a period of deep depression where i holed myself up in my apartment and drank and smoked myself into oblivion, i withdrew from many friends and activities. when i finally surfaced one day to tell theresa just how bad it had been going for me, her overall reaction was that i needed to snap out of it and get back out into the world; she was tired of not having me around to do things with her. * i warned annaliese when i was introducing her to theresa for the first time that theresa could seem a little standoffish. “don’t take it personally,” i said. “it takes her a while to warm up to people, probably because she’s a scorpio.” i actually made this excuse for theresa quite a bit when i had her meet my new friend group in ann arbor. i wanted girlfriends to look past her hard exterior and see the fun-loving person who’d been by my side for years, i wanted to bring my two worlds together. looking back, i remember a conversation theresa and i had once had about how we often thought men mistook us for flirting with them because we were warm people. but now i’m realizing that a key difference between us was that i’m warm with everyone—theresa acted chilly toward women as a result of her own insecurities that she hid well. * for my thirtieth birthday, theresa slept over at my house along with some other windsor friends after we celebrated my birthday at a korean karaoke bar. while her and i were speaking in my music room before my party, i had an idea for a song lyric and wrote it on a post-it and put it on the wall (this was my first foray back into writing after having been a blocked artist for years). the lyric said “sleep in the valley of my clavicle,” which was clunky, but i liked the idea of it. when theresa saw it, she made fun of it. “that sounds like it should be part of an electric six song and sung in a ridiculous falsetto,” she said. then she demonstrated it for me. * theresa was the first person i confided in, besides my therapist, when michael came into my life as i was married to brandon (see “the_red_thread”). at the time, her and i bonded over this situation because she was in a similar one. she had been living with her boyfriend mark, but her ex, jan, had been texting her, trying to test the waters to see if she was really as happy in her relationship as she claimed to be. jan and theresa had always had this on-again/off-again dynamic between them, they were continuously drawn to each other no matter how much hurt had been caused. so, i became her safe person to confide in while she dealt with two different men, and she became my safe person to confide in while i managed the same. when my physical affair started with michael, i told theresa that i was preparing to leave brandon; the only reason it took three weeks to do this was because one of his cousins, who was our age, was in the icu dying of pancreatitis; i didn’t want to his family to be hit with two tragedies at the same time, and so i waited until a week after the cousin’s funeral to break the news to brandon. after this occurred, theresa reacted as though she was just as blindsided by my leaving brandon as he was. she judged me harshly for breaking up my marriage, after she had supporting me for months, after i shared what that crisis had been like and how difficult it was for me to navigate. the thing is, i didn’t push back on her judgments of me because they were the same judgments i held about myself; so i let her treat me in the way that i thought i deserved because i was a shitty human being. * when theresa and jan were to meet michael for the first time at a war on drugs concert in detroit, she texted me prior to the meetup saying that her and jan were going to “fuck with michael” just for the hell of it. i had no idea how to even respond to that message, so i left it alone. at st. andrew’s hall, jan completely ignored michael, and steered clear of us all night, hanging out with other friends instead. theresa talked with michael and i, detailing all the recent drugs she’d been using with jan; there’d been some frequent nights filled with cocaine and weekends of taking ecstasy so she and jan could fool around with another couple. i was newly sober at the time—michael had already been sober for three years—and i was mortified that this was the conversation we were having. your friends reflect who you are. i had never felt so much dissonance. it was as though i saw my relationship with theresa clearly for the first time and i didn’t like what it had shown me. * there was a period of time where theresa would visit ann arbor regularly and i thought she was doing this to check in on me as i was going through my divorce. turns out she was scheduling brief meetups with me one-on-one, before reconnecting with jan, who was hanging out elsewhere in town with brandon. once the three of them were together, they’d spend the rest of the day chilling at beer gardens. she never told me any of this; i found it out by looking at her instagram pictures afterward. when i left brandon, i figured that it was only fair for me to lose anyone i had ever met through him. his friends would be his friends and my friends would be my friends. that’s not what happened; theresa and jan took his side in the divorce. * theresa and i had been doing a monthly dj residency at villains bistro when i had been living in the states. this arrangement began to wear on me after i became sober and i wanted to quit spinning for good. when i mentioned this to theresa, she dismissed my concerns saying that we didn’t dj to drink. i cried before getting on the road for the last dj event i did with her; i did not want to go to windsor and pretend like everything was fine, that i was okay with being in a bar for four hours watching people drink and have asinine conversations. michael tried to comfort me by saying, “you don’t have to do this.” “no, i have to,” i said. dealing with theresa’s guilt trips seemed easier than standing up for myself. after that last event, my car’s serpentine belt broke, rendering the vehicle complete junk; i had no way of getting to windsor anymore. it was a blessing because it got me out of continuing to dj. it was a reason theresa had to accept rather than challenge. * later that summer, michael and i were in windsor to visit family and theresa invited us to attend the dj night that she was still carrying on at villains. we had planned to attend for a short while, to be friendly. but when i checked the start time for the event on facebook, i saw that brandon was going to be there. and not only was he going to be there, he was djing with her. theresa had made no mention of this when inviting me. “why didn’t you tell me brandon was going to be there tonight?” i texted her. “oh, i honestly forgot,” she replied. “you forgot that my ex-husband was going to be djing with you tonight? don’t you think that’s a crucial detail to leave out?” she apologized but i didn’t believe her. “are you trying to sabotage my relationship with michael?” we did not attend her dj night. * after i’d been sober for nearly a year, theresa invited me to go on a girl’s camping trip that had become a yearly tradition for us at the pinery. i expressed my reservations to her; during those trips we drank a ton and smoked a lot of weed. i didn’t see how that would work for me being sober now. “we don’t do *that* much of it!” she said, dismissing me. what i couldn’t tell her: “i don’t trust myself not to drink and drug with you. i don’t trust that you won’t try to pressure me to abandon my sobriety like you have in the past.” she kept twisting my arm to join them. eventually i lied and said that i had a school assignment due that weekend (i was in an online mba program at the time), because it was the only way i knew she would stop bulldozing me about the trip. * i didn’t want to invite her and jan to mine and michael’s wedding. michael didn’t want them there either. i held back her save-the-date card because i was unsure about the state of our friendship given all that had happened. i was content to let us fade away rather than confront her about all the ways in which our relationship had changed, or the ways in which she disappointed me as friend because i knew she wouldn’t hear me out anyway. her and jan were planning to get married that same summer. her texts that year increased with frequency: “we should go dress shopping together!” texts of that sort. eventually, she got the message that something was amiss with us, and asked what was wrong. i sent her a list of all the things she had done since i had left brandon that had made me feel she was not my supporter. she asked if we could meet for coffee in ann arbor to talk it over in person and i agreed. our meeting was awkward but i said what i needed to say. theresa had an excuse for everything. when i told her i thought too much had changed she said, “you’re not the only who’s changed you know,” as if personal growth was some kind of competition. she minimized everything i had said to her and i chose the path of least resistance because i was too tired to stand up for what i wanted and deserved. i figured if we could get through my wedding and her wedding, that would wrap up our friendship for good. if only had two more hurdles to get through before letting her go, i could manage it. when i arrived back home after that meeting, michael asked me how it went. “i guess her and i are friends again,” i said. he was stunned; before i left the house, i told him this meeting would be the last time her and i would be conversing. a couple of days later i sent out her save-the-date card for my wedding. * theresa told me that brandon was going to be at her wedding to jan. she wanted me to know so that i could decide whether or not i was okay with attending. i told her that i appreciated her saying that, and that i would give it my full consideration though i couldn’t make any promises. she sounded like she understood. but a month later, her story changed. “i really want you to be at my wedding; could you just come for the ceremony and leave for the reception?” i said it was a possibility but i would need more time to think it over. eventually i told her that i could deal with attending the ceremony. but as we learned more details about her wedding, i discovered that the ceremony and reception were taking place at the same location. there was no easy way to slip out between the two events. i was certain that if i arrived at her wedding, she would pressure me to stay at the reception when i was not comfortable with doing so. it wasn’t just that i didn’t want to see brandon; there were going to be a lot of old faces at their wedding i didn’t want to see. no one really knew what had happened to me two years prior with leaving brandon and getting sober and i didn’t want to face any scrutiny around that. this is the problem with anxiety, it makes you feel like everyone is looking at you and judging you when they couldn’t give two shits about your life. on the day of her wedding, michael and i were dressed and ready to go. when it was time to drive to the location, i realized i couldn’t go through with it. i didn’t text her because i didn’t want to give her bad news on the happiest day of her life. instead, i dropped off her wedding card along with an apology card in her mailbox. in the card i wrote that my absence had more to do with me and my shit and that i was so happy for them to take this journey together. i’m so glad michael and i did not attend; in her wedding album there was a group picture taken with every guest at the wedding—we would have been coerced to be a part of that. * theresa emailed me a week or so after her wedding to say that she loved me but that it was truly hurtful that i did not attend her wedding. “we definitely have some work to do to repair the friendship.” she said that sometimes relationships had breaks and pauses and that if i needed one, she would be here for me when i was ready. i wrote to her that i had come to terms with our friendship being broken and accepting it for what it was. i told her that i felt our relationship was beyond repair and that i took responsibility for that because i should’ve talked to her about all the things that had been bothering me as they were happening. i said i thought it was best that we go our separate ways. i told her i would continue to hold her in my heart and that i wished her nothing but happiness in her marriage and all her future aspirations. and then i closed by saying that i was sorry for all that had happened and how things had turned out. * shortly thereafter, she texted me after my grandmother died. i told her i appreciated her condolences. three months later, she texted me after trump got elected. i told her i appreciated her condolences. about a month after that, she texted me to say that she had dreamt of me the night prior. i blocked her number from my phone. 211006 ... tender_square i keep dreaming about her, and in those dreams we have plans and we're hanging out like we used to. i want to ask my subconscious what it means and why. 220510 what's it to you? who go blather from