The arc of some stories is much longer than others. Some people burst into our world like Halley's Comet, lighting up our sky for a brief but eternally memorable moment once in a lifetime, whereas others pass slowly through the month of our existence like a waxing moon, their nearly imperceptible pull only making itself known just before it slips away forever. One such moon rose my first day of high school.
I don't remember precisely the first words der Komiker said to me, but I can almost guarantee they made me laugh. I do remember the layout of the room and the complete bafflement of most of the students when the Frau launched straight into our first German lesson with "ich heiße Frau Schneider, wie heißt du?", but didn't recognise at the time that my immediate comprehension of her words and pantomime said more about my linguistic skills than the inferred stupidity of my classmates. Much to my delight and our teacher's chagrin, der Komiker sat next to me in our science class and kept me laughing for the rest of the year.
If some kindly person had thought to hand my 14-year-old self a checklist of what to look for as the foundation of a healthy relationship, I might have realised as quickly as I'd understood the Frau that der Komiker was ideal boyfriend material. I always felt relaxed and happy around him, I found everything he did and said fascinating, but I only associated attraction and passion for someone with unrequited yearning, so I failed to recognise the gem I'd stumbled upon. It took me nearly three full years to realise the depths of my feelings for him.
Three years is a long time in the life of a teen. Three years is also a very long time to think someone is your best friend even though you rarely see them outside of school, except for the occasional encounter on your way to or from school, or a shared extracurricular activity. This, to my mind, is one of the greatest travesties of not having my social-emotional challenges recognised decades earlier: I have no idea what it means to actually make a friend.
To my way of thinking, a friend was anyone with whom I could share a pleasant and comfortable conversation, a few laughs, maybe an inside joke or two, on more than one occasion. A best friend was someone who kept coming back over the years and had a shared interest or two. Der Komiker was one of the few who ticked both boxes in those tumultuous high school years.
The summer before our Senior year, I took up a new martial art he'd been studying for many years and it struck me that I really wanted to extend the reach of our friendship. I still had no notion of spending much time with my peers outside of school or coordinated activities, as my time was highly over subscribed with work, study, practice, and extracurricular activities. I thought that sharing a locker would cement our friendship and perhaps facilitate its growth into something more.
The year started out normally enough, I was still dating an older guy from the other side of the state and hadn't fully hatched my long-term locker scheme. I also wasn't around school much anymore, as I was taking the bulk of my classes at the university. As someone for whom flying solo is the norm, it never dawned on me at the time that this might have been socially isolating for my friend to have a perpetually absentee locker mate. But I don't know what caused the schism.
Schism by Panagiotis Kountouras
Shortly after I broke up with my boyfriend at Thanksgiving, der Komiker lit up on my radar like never before. Maybe I'd finally learned enough about crappy relationships to start cluing into better ones, or maybe he clocked me properly over the head during one of our sparring matches, or perhaps the wind just shifted the right way, but suddenly the moon was shining so brightly I could no longer ignore it. I'm sure my behaviour toward him changed because I wanted the nature of our relationship to change, but I had no idea how to go about it. What I was unaware of, was all the other friendships he'd fostered in lieu of a real one with me. The more I tried to draw him into a state of exclusivity with me, the more strongly I repelled him into their fold.
I don't know if there was one particularly egregious faux pas or just a whole series of muddled social niceties, misunderstandings, and over estimations of our loyalties to one another that tipped the balance, but he eventually cut me off completely. Not only did he stop using our shared locker altogether, but he ceased acknowledging my existence. Instead of a friendly 'hello', I was met only with contemptuous looks from his companions as I passed their tight little knot of friends. He was the last link I had to any kind of social life within my high school and he made it explicitly clear that I was not wanted. I cannot even begin to put words to the degree of pain caused by this ostracisation. When I think back on it, I experience a sense of disconnection with my body the likes of which I can only relate to hovering near-death. It is not pleasant.
We graduated and went our separate ways without saying goodbye or even the most cursory reparations. I was heart broken. I'd lost my best friend and I didn't think he even cared.
Then something truly horrendous happened. Death puts all things into stark perspective and the sudden and unexpected death of someone who dramatically changed so many young lives leaves people reeling and reconsidering all kinds of things. It was death that reconnected us, if only tangentially, just momentarily, only just enough to see a crack of light in the shroud of confusion over what happened between us. I have never wished so desperately to attend a memorial service and never regretted so deeply not insisting on doing so. But my mother went in place of her children who were both so moulded by the man a vast community gathered to grieve that day, and der Komiker sought her out, "bounded, not walked, across the gym to get to me!" to ask her how I was. She gave him my newly minted email address and he wrote to me.
I had to ask what happened. I had to tell him how much I missed him and how much it hurt that he rejected me. He was deeply sorry, but he wouldn't explain what happened. He brushed it off as a "stupid misunderstanding". If I knew then how horribly that incomplete explanation would haunt me for the rest of my days, I would have begged for more information because I am fundamentally unable to "just let it go."
We had one brief encounter a little over a year later. I transferred to his university for a multitude of reasons and was walking across campus during a quiet period between terms. I can still hear the widely spaced slaps of his enormous feet bounding not walking up behind me in an attempted sneak attack and see him flying through the air as I spun around to catch him in the act. Once again, he'd made me laugh. We only talked briefly and I never saw him again.
On the surface, one could easily argue that nothing ever happened between us, that it was all in my head. Certainly I'd agree that the less platonic feelings were entirely one-sided and I have no problem owning that, but our friendship seemed so very real to me, there was an undeniable falling out, and he showed in the aftermath that he did value my friendship too. But I cannot make sense of what happened. There is such an agonising sense of loss that accompanies every thought of him, even if it is just for the friend I thought I had.
I cannot help but wonder if things would have been different if my neurological differences had been recognised, accepted, and supported back then. How I might have received more instruction on how to make friends and navigate relationships of all kinds. How I might have had the courage to say, "I do not understand why you're doing/saying that, can you please explain," instead of slinking back into my corner of self doubt and loathing assuming I was simply an unloveable soul. This is why I want things to be different for my daughter, I do not want her lost in this sea of confusion that continues to drown her for 20, 30, 40, ?? years. I want her to seek resolution and answers in the moment instead of letting them bang around in her head until she wants to tear them out by any means possible.
I think this is an important component of Autism awareness/acceptance and the mental health risks that accompany neurological differences. Seemingly small or innocuous things that other people can "just get over" can spiral the Autistic/ND brain into a whirlpool of anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation, or worse. It seems like such a small ask to support the ND community with guidance to gaining closure and NTs to recognising how desperately important it is for us to have this whenever possible. Sometimes the littlest things can make the biggest difference.
