There’s something I haven’t really wanted to admit.

Garbe has been showing up in my dreams lately.

Not when our friendship first fell apart. Not during those first weeks and months when everything was raw and I was angry and hurt and trying to understand how someone who had been such a huge part of my life could suddenly become someone I didn’t talk to anymore.

No. Apparently my brain decided more than a year later was the perfect time to start inviting him over while I’m sleeping.

I don’t understand why now.

In the dreams, we aren’t fixing anything. There’s no dramatic reunion. No apology that magically puts everything back together. We aren’t even really trying to mend the friendship.

He’s just there.

And every time, I have this feeling that he wants to say something to me.

But he doesn’t.

There is still silence between us.

Apparently even my subconscious can’t get the man to fucking communicate.

I can laugh at that a little. I need to. But underneath the humor is something that still hurts enough that I cried about it today.

It’s been a little over a year.

And I still miss my best friend.

I Don’t Just Miss Talking. I Miss Our Talking.

There are people I can talk to.

I have people in my life. I have friendships. I have people I love, people who care about me and people I can reach out to when I need someone.

This isn’t about having nobody.

It’s about not having him.

I miss our conversations.

There was a way we talked that belonged specifically to us. He knew the backstory. He knew the people. He knew the things that had happened years before and why something happening today might hit a wound nobody else could see.

He knew deep things.

There was so much I didn’t have to explain.

And there is still so much I want to tell him.

Except even that sentence isn't completely accurate.

There is so much I want to tell the Garbe I knew.

That's the person I miss.

The person I could tell something ridiculous to and already know what kind of response I'd get. The person I wanted to tell when something good happened. The person I could bring the ugly stuff to. The person who knew enough about me that I didn't have to start every story with seventeen paragraphs of context.

I miss being known like that.

Sometimes something happens and I still think about what I would tell him. I wonder what he'd say. What joke he'd make. Whether he'd tell me I'm being ridiculous or immediately understand why something affected me as much as it did.

And then comes the part that still catches me.

I can't tell him.

Or maybe I could technically find a way to tell him, but the person I'm imagining telling belongs to a friendship that doesn't exist anymore.

That's different.

I don't know the person he is to me now.

I know the person he was.

And I miss him.

He Was My Safe Person

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why losing this particular friendship affected me so deeply.

Friendships end all the time. People grow apart. Lives change. Priorities change. Sometimes people hurt each other. Sometimes relationships simply stop fitting.

I've lost people before.

This was different.

And recently I realized why.

I felt safe with him.

Not the casual kind of safe where you know someone probably won't judge your weird sense of humor.

I mean genuinely emotionally safe.

He knew the complicated parts of me. He knew things I didn't hand out freely. He knew pieces of my history that explained why I reacted the way I did sometimes.

But there was something even bigger than that.

He protected me when I didn't feel protected by anyone else.

And that matters.

When you've spent enough of your life feeling like you're the one who has to watch your own back, having someone step into that space with you changes something.

For once, I didn't feel like I was standing guard completely alone.

Somewhere along the way, my brain connected Garbe with that feeling.

When he was there, I could put some of the armor down.

And then he wasn't there anymore.

I don't think I understood until recently that I wasn't only grieving the loss of a friendship.

I was grieving the loss of safety.

The Person Who Made Me Feel Safe Also Broke My Heart

This is the part I still don't know how to make neat.

The person who once made me feel protected became someone I needed to heal from.

Both things are true.

And for a long time, I think I believed I needed to pick one.

Either he was the person who loved me, protected me and made me feel safe, or he was the person who hurt me.

But relationships aren't always that clean.

People can be incredibly important to us and still hurt us.

Someone can show up for you during some of the hardest moments of your life and later fail to show up in another.

Someone can make you feel safe for years and still leave you feeling abandoned when the relationship ends.

The ending doesn't erase everything that came before it.

And the good memories don't erase the ending.

That's something I've had to learn the hard way.

I don't want to rewrite our entire friendship because I'm angry with him. There were years of real friendship there. Real conversations. Real laughter. Real support. Real safety.

I also don't want nostalgia to convince me that because those things were real, the hurt somehow wasn't.

He was safe for me once.

And losing him hurt me deeply.

I can hold both.

Why Am I Dreaming About Him Now?

This is the part that has been messing with my head lately.

Why now?

Why didn't I have these dreams when everything first went to shit?

Why more than a year later, when I've already done so much grieving?

I don't think dreams are secret messages telling me he wants to talk to me. I don't think the universe is slipping Garbe into my sleep because I'm supposed to reach out.

Maybe there's no profound explanation at all.

But I've wondered whether my mind simply has more room for it now.

When something first falls apart, sometimes you're busy surviving the immediate pain. You're angry. You're replaying conversations. You're trying to understand what happened. You're figuring out how to get through days that suddenly look different because someone who used to be part of them isn't there.

Later, the emergency part quiets down.

And maybe that's when some of the deeper grief finally gets a chance to speak.

Maybe dream-Garbe isn't trying to tell me anything.

Maybe my brain is simply giving a face to everything that was never said.

Because that's the strange thing about losing someone without the kind of closure you wanted.

The conversation can end in real life while continuing inside your head for a very long time.

Friendship Grief Is Weird

We don't talk enough about how devastating the end of a friendship can be.

When a romantic relationship ends, people understand heartbreak.

There's language for it. Songs about it. Movies about it. People expect you to grieve.

Friendship grief can feel strangely invisible.

Nobody sends flowers because you and your best friend stopped speaking.

There's no socially acceptable grieving period.

Nobody knows the anniversary except you.

The person is still alive. They're somewhere out there living their life, and you're living yours.

Yet a relationship that occupied a huge emotional space in your life is gone.

That's a form of loss.

And sometimes there isn't a clean ending. There isn't a final conversation where both people say everything they needed to say and walk away understanding each other.

Sometimes there is just silence.

That can leave you grieving not only what happened, but everything that never got to happen.

The conversations you thought you'd have.

The things you assumed you'd tell them someday.

The future versions of yourselves you assumed would still know each other.

And apparently, sometimes you grieve those things again more than a year later on a completely ordinary day.

I cried today.

For a while, I would have seen that as proof I wasn't over it.

I don't anymore.

Missing Someone Doesn't Mean I Need Them Back

This distinction has been important for me.

Missing Garbe doesn't automatically mean I want to go backward.

Missing our conversations doesn't mean the relationship could simply return to what it was.

Missing the safety I felt with him doesn't mean he's the only person capable of making me feel safe.

And loving who someone once was to me doesn't require me to ignore what happened afterward.

Sometimes I think we make grief harder because we believe every feeling requires an action.

I miss him, so maybe I should contact him.

I'm thinking about him, so maybe it means something.

I dreamed about him, so maybe I'm supposed to do something.

Maybe not.

Maybe sometimes I just fucking miss him.

Maybe that's allowed to be the whole thing.

I can feel it without acting on it.

I can cry without reopening a door.

I can remember without rewriting history.

And I can wish I could talk to the Garbe I knew while recognizing that I don't actually know what a relationship between us would look like today.

That's sad.

But it's honest.

I Haven't Felt Safe Since He Left

This is probably the hardest thing I've realized.

I haven't really felt safe since he left.

I've functioned.

I've lived my life.

I've laughed. I've worked. I've written. I've loved other people. I've handled things. I've kept moving.

But that particular feeling of being able to put my guard down?

I miss it.

And I've started wondering whether I've spent too much time thinking the solution was finding someone else who could make me feel that way again.

Maybe that's not what I need.

Maybe I need to learn how to create some of that safety inside myself.

That sounds lovely when written on the internet.

Actually doing it is considerably more annoying.

Because I don't want the bullshit version of independence where I convince myself I don't need anybody.

I do.

I want people.

I want deep friendships. I want people who know the real things. I want someone I can call when everything goes sideways. I want to be loved. I want people to protect me sometimes because I am fucking tired of always being the one protecting myself.

Wanting connection isn't weakness.

The difference is that I don't want my entire sense of safety living inside another human being anymore.

Because people can leave.

Relationships can change.

And if another person is the only place where I feel safe, losing them means losing part of myself too.

I've already learned what that feels like.

I don't want to learn it twice.

He Wasn't My Safety

This realization has been uncomfortable, but important:

Garbe wasn't my safety.

I felt safe with Garbe.

Those sound almost identical.

They're not.

If he was my safety, then when he left, safety left permanently with him.

But if I was capable of experiencing safety in his presence, then that feeling existed somewhere inside me too.

He helped create an environment where I could access it.

He showed me what it felt like to have someone in my corner.

He showed me what it felt like when somebody knew the deep stuff and stayed.

He showed me what it felt like to believe, even temporarily, that I didn't have to handle absolutely everything alone.

Those experiences were real.

But they don't belong exclusively to him.

That's what I'm trying to learn now.

Learning to Become a Safe Place for Myself

I don't completely know how to do this yet.

That's probably the most honest thing I can tell you.

I'm figuring it out.

Sometimes feeling safe with myself means noticing that I'm overwhelmed before I completely lose myself inside the feeling.

Sometimes it's music.

Sometimes it's walking until my brain gets quieter.

Sometimes it's being in the woods where nothing needs an explanation.

Sometimes it's writing the thing I desperately want to tell someone else and realizing I can sit with it myself first.

Sometimes it's letting myself cry without turning the tears into evidence that I'm falling apart.

And sometimes it means reaching out to someone I trust.

Because learning to feel safe within myself doesn't mean isolating myself.

It means allowing people to support me without making one person responsible for holding all of me.

That's a huge difference.

I want people beside me.

I just don't want to disappear when one of them walks away.

Maybe That's What I'm Actually Healing

For a long time, I thought healing from this friendship meant eventually reaching a point where I didn't miss him.

Maybe that's not it.

Maybe Garbe will always occupy a particular chapter of my life.

Maybe I'll always occasionally hear something and think, He would have laughed his ass off at this.

Maybe there will always be things I wish I could tell the version of him I knew.

Maybe someday those thoughts won't hurt.

Maybe sometimes they still will.

I don't know.

But I'm starting to understand that healing doesn't require me to erase someone who mattered to me.

It requires me to stop abandoning myself because they aren't here anymore.

That feels different.

I Still Miss You

So yes.

I still miss him.

I miss our conversations.

I miss having someone who already knew the deep things.

I miss the ridiculous things too.

I miss not having to explain myself.

And maybe most of all, I miss how safe I felt knowing someone had my back.

Today, I cried about it.

More than a year later.

And I'm not going to shame myself for that.

I don't know why he's showing up in my dreams now.

I don't know what my brain is trying to work through, if anything.

I don't know whether there will ever be another conversation between us.

But I know something I didn't understand when this friendship first ended.

I don't need to stop missing him in order to keep moving forward.

I can miss him and still choose myself.

I can remember the safety without believing he's the only place I'll ever find it.

I can want to tell him something and survive not telling him.

I can love the person he was to me without knowing the person he is now.

And I can let other people love me without handing any one person the only key to my sense of safety.

I don't want to become someone who needs nobody.

That's not who I am.

I love deeply. I connect deeply. And when someone matters to me, they fucking matter.

I just want to know that if someone leaves, I'll still have somewhere safe to come home to.

Me.

The one I once felt safe with broke my heart.

He also showed me what feeling protected felt like.

Now I'm trying to learn how to give some of that feeling to myself.

And maybe that's the part of this story I couldn't have written a year ago.

~Tj🩷

If You're Grieving a Friendship Too

Friendship loss can hurt long after the relationship ends, especially when that person was a major source of emotional support or safety. Missing them doesn't automatically mean reconciliation is right for you, and having a difficult day doesn't erase the progress you've made.

If you're trying to rebuild emotional safety after losing someone important, start small. Notice what helps your body and mind settle. Build more than one supportive relationship rather than placing every emotional need in one person. Practice keeping promises to yourself. Let yourself remember good things without using those memories to minimize why the relationship ended. And when grief resurfaces, try asking yourself a different question—not Why am I still upset? but What am I needing right now?

Sometimes the answer isn't the person you lost.

Sometimes it's the feeling you once had with them.

And feelings can be rebuilt.