Tag Archives: making amends

I sent a friend request to Andre

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, about positivity, about being positive and staying positive and doing and thinking positive things. It’s been a journey, a real journey, deep within, I’m accessing like universal things here, about humanity, about positivity, words like oneness and the universe and consciousness. It’s a real spiritual awakening here, and so it came to me, not really like an epiphany, because it wasn’t just one thing, but a lot of epiphanies, not little epiphanies, but big epiphanies, one after the other, and so everything’s constantly changing.

And so I thought about Andre. We kept butting heads, reaching out, pulling back, ultimately it got to the point where we lost all contact with each other. Our friendship was all but destroyed, almost like it never existed in the first place. But it did exist, I think, and so as I continued deeper and deeper on my spiritual cosmic journey of universal self-discovery, I felt like there was something holding me back, preventing me from achieving that real oneness. It was Andre.

I resolved to make things right between us, to absolve the stain from our shared history, make true amends. I sent him a friend request on Facebook. I was the one who severed that digital tie months ago. We had this botched fishing trip and when I got home I removed him from my friend list that night.

But a day passed. And then another day. And Andre didn’t accept. I sent him a text message, “Yo, u get my friend request?” with no response. I tried clicking on his profile, but only very limited information was available to non-friends. So I asked our shared friends, a group that, to be honest, I’d kind of lost touch with over the past year. I really just stopped taking most phone calls from those guys. I didn’t want it to be weird, if the both of us showed up, Andre and me, ruining everybody else’s good time.

My friend Tony filled me in, told me that Andre joined the Air Force, that he left like six months ago. They had a big party, this huge send off. Was I even invited? I could feel my grip on the positivity starting to slip. “But hey,” Tony told me, “He’s coming back earlier than expected. He got wounded, and so he had to be discharged. We’re all having a huge welcome home party this Thursday. You should come. Nobody’s seen you in forever.”

I felt like a huge dick, like I’d alienated all of my friends, like I’ve been spending so much time on my positivity training that I had totally lost touch with everybody. And yeah, I wasn’t on speaking terms with Andre, but I would have come to his send off. Come on, they should have reached out; I would have been there for him.

I showed up on Thursday and everybody was huddled around this one stool by the bar. I only saw the top of Andre’s head because he was sitting down. All of these crazy thoughts went through my head, like what were the extent of Andre’s injuries? Did he have all of his limbs? Would he still recognize me?

But then he got up off the stool, like stood up by himself, and he turned around to order another drink. That’s when we made eye contact. I went up to him, I told him, “Hey man, sorry it’s been so long. I sent you a Facebook friend request.”

“Thanks man,” he said. That was it, which was good, because normally he’d say something like, “That’s big of you,” and whatever, we’ve always, or I’ve always had this who’s-the-bigger-person complex, but it’s all silly, it doesn’t matter. This guy’s a vet now, he’s totally the bigger person.

And so I threw in a, “Thanks for your service Andre,” and he kind of shrugged, “You know, just trying to do my part,” and he just sort of looked down at his shoes. “So what happened?” I asked, “Why’d you get sent home?” and he looked up and said, “My injury.” I was like, “Yeah, is it bad? Did you get wounded in a conflict?”

He shook his head, “No, I was just getting all of this back pain during training, so before we got shipped out, they sent me home.” Just then our friend Hank, he shouted out to the whole bar, “Hey let’s welcome back our good friend Andre, a real American hero!” and everybody started cheering. Andre did a casual salute to the bar and everyone went nuts.

“So,” I tried to bring him back to our conversation, “you never even really went?” “No, I went, I just, you know, I’m injured.”

“Three cheers for Andre!”

“Hip hip, hooray!”

And I felt myself drifting slightly from my spiritual center, and I was about to say something, I had that look on my face, like, are you serious? And you’re going to stand here and take this hero’s welcome? I didn’t say it, but I didn’t have to, because, like I said, I was making that kind of weird skeptical face.

“Well what about the friend request? Are you going to accept it?” and he said, “OK, sure,” and he took out his phone right there and accepted it, but when he exited the Facebook app, right before he put his phone away, I looked toward his text message notifications, and I wanted to check his messages, to see if he ignored that text message I sent him, so I said, “Do you mind if I borrow your phone for a second?” and he just said, “What? Uh, hold on, I have to go to the bathroom,” and when he came back he didn’t mention the phone thing, didn’t mention the text message.

The rest of the night went by without incident. When I got home, I went onto Facebook and Andre was back on my news feed. He wrote, “Glad to be home! Thanks everybody for coming out! War is hell!” and like three of our friends responded, stuff like, “USA! USA! USA!”

Andre and me on a boat

Andre and I, we went on a fishing trip last weekend, just the two of us. We hadn’t spoken since his grandmother’s funeral. I guess he needed time to grieve. Things had just gotten really bad between us, it was like every time we got together we’d start to bicker, things would escalate, slowly, steadily, until one of us lost our cool and, you know, that would be it, we wouldn’t speak again for weeks, months.

It must have gotten weird with our extended group of friends, because my buddy Cliff told me, “Hey Rob, look Andre wants to make amends, but he’s really nervous, with everything that’s gone down. Anyway, he wanted me to invite you upstate, a nice little fishing trip, you guys can like, you know, rekindle your friendship.”

And I thought, wow, that’s pretty deep. But I only thought that for a second. Because then another thought replaced that first thought, and that new thought was this: no way Andre sent Cliff over to invite me upstate. It’s probably the larger group of friends, all of them deciding that they need us to settle things, to make it easier for the whole group to hang out, and so they drew straws and Cliff got picked to come to me, telling me Andre sent the invite, and then he’d go to Andre, and say that I sent the invite.

Everybody’s seen this episode before. We’d be sitting on that little fishing boat, just the two of us in the middle of some big lake. And we’d both be fishing at opposite ends of the boat, not looking at each other, not saying anything, both of us with really grumpy looking expressions on our face. And finally, just as the silence becomes too unbearable, we’d both say simultaneously, “Well aren’t you going to apologize? What? Me? You! Why did you even invite me on this fishing trip? What? Me invite you? You invited me!”

And classic Andre, he always has this way of turning every situation to his advantage. Regardless of how clever I think I am, how I’m usually able to sweet talk my way out of any situation, Andre always manages to get in my head, his verbal jumping jacks. So I figured, I see where this is going, I might as well try to embrace the deception. Andre thinks I’m setting this whole thing up, well, at least one of us will know the truth, one of us will have the upper hand.

I’m talking about me, obviously, with the upper hand. That was my plan anyway. We got on the boat, I let him stew for a little bit, and finally I broke the silence with, “Andre, look, I brought you up here because, well, this is kind of hard for me to say, but I wanted to apologize.” And I really had to stop myself from throwing in my customary, “because I wanted to be the bigger person,” because even though it’s true, even though I was being the bigger person, that’s how these things usually unfold. I figure, this time, actions, not words. Or, not actions exactly, but more subtle words. More clever. Cleverer. I know I’m the bigger person. So I don’t have to go flaunting it.

“What are you talking about,” Andre shot back, “I sent Cliff over to you because you never answer my calls. I set this whole trip up.” Which sounded like a bunch of baloney. I always take Andre’s calls. I always take all of my phone calls. Andre just wanted to get Cliff involved, to get everybody involved, to show off, to show me up, and now I was getting upset, and I wasn’t even thinking this stuff in my head anymore, I was saying it out loud, “You just wanted the rest of the group to think you’re being the bigger person, that you’re the one always making amends. At least I showed up to your grandma’s funeral. You didn’t even call me when my grandma died!”

Which wasn’t true. Andre totally came to my grandma’s funeral. I didn’t even know why I said that, it was because I was so angry I guess. And Andre didn’t say anything either. I guess he knew that, at that point anyway, it was stupid to even try to say anything else. Because who knew what I was capable of saying next?

But the worst part was, the whole me telling him that I wanted to apologize, that was only part one of my plan. After we had made amends, I wanted us to have a little laugh, something funny, funny but natural, like an organic, bonding type of laugh. So I bought this magnetic fishhook. The idea is to use the magnetic fishhook to attract your friend’s fishhook, and then you start reeling it in, slowly. Your friend thinks he has a bite and starts pulling, and you keep fighting it out for a while, until you realize that your hooks are hooked together, and that was supposed to be the organic laugh, we’d have made amends, and then we’d see the hooks, and it was supposed to be like, look, we’re hooked together, and we would have laughed and laughed and realized how silly we were being.

But nothing was happening, it wasn’t attracting. So I kept reeling in and casting out again, really close to the boat, over and over again, getting more and more frustrated. And then I turned to Andre and he was doing the same thing, in and out, over and over again, and I was like, wait a second. I looked at his back pocket, sticking out was the same packaging, the same, “Magnetic Trick Fishhook” wrapper, the hooks must have been repelling each other. And I was thinking, Jesus Andre, you unoriginal jerk, you can’t just let me have one trick fishhook gag? You really just can’t let me have one real, genuine moment, can you?

Making amends with Andre

Andre sent me a text last week saying how he felt bad about things had ended and that he wanted to meet up and maybe restart the friendship and let bygones be bygones. That son of a bitch. Now he’s going to go around to everyone and show off the text message and people will say stuff like, “Wow Andre, you’re a really big person, you know that?” And he’ll kind of just look at them, not saying anything out loud, maybe he’ll give a really fake shrug, a nonverbal response that says without saying it, “Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

And I’m such an idiot. I just ignored the message without remembering that on the iPhone it shows up on the text message screen as saying, “delivered,” or, “read.” So he’s probably going around to everyone, and while he’s showing everyone that he’s trying to make amends, he’ll also be letting them know that I’m ignoring him, that I purposefully saw, read, and then didn’t respond to his message.

And let me tell you, this is all such bullshit. Everybody knows that I’m the bigger person. And whatever, if you don’t think I’m the biggest person, I mean, that’s a different argument. I think we can all agree that I’m definitely a bigger person than Andre. I never responded to his text because I knew he was full of it. I could just tell. I’d text something like, “Sure man, no hard feelings,” and then he would probably respond with something like, “So yeah, I’m thinking about hosting a picnic this Saturday and I was hoping you could swing by. Any chance you could be in charge of picking up some potato salad on the way there?”

Again, this might seem like a harmless request, but we have such a loaded history. One time I hosted my own picnic and Andre sabotaged it. And it worked. I’m still so pissed off about that picnic. It was going to be so much fun. I had to get rid of like ten friends that day. I just can’t let him get any closer.

But at the same time, the idea of him walking around telling people that I carry grudges, or that I’m standoffish, or that I should consider going to a therapist, that it’s done wonders for him, that he could refer me to his guy, that it doesn’t matter if I don’t have insurance, that the guy will work with me on my budget. Fucking Andre, I can’t, I just can’t give him that satisfaction.

But I couldn’t think of what to do or how to get out of this. A couple more days passed before I thought of the perfect solution. I texted Andre back from my number saying, “Sorry, wrong number.” And he texted back, “Rob?” and I wrote, “No man, wrong number.” And then he wrote back something like, “OK, sorry.” Fucking Andre. That guy always has to have the last word. Every single time. So I wrote back, “NP.” You know, for “no problem.” And then he wrote, “NP?” Jesus Christ, everybody knows what NP means, he just has to have the last word.

I went to the AT&T store and told them I wanted a whole new account, new number, everything. Right before the clerk activated the switch, I sent Andre one last text message, “No problem,” and then told the clerk “Now! Switch it!” and the clerk was like, “Well, I mean, it’s not instantaneous. But it should only take a second. Let’s see …”

Incompetent clerks. Only a second. It was like five minutes. And of course Andre texted back, “Oh, OK.” Why does he always have to respond? At what point are you just like, fine, I don’t care about having the last word. And he thinks he’s the bigger person? What kind of a bigger person just keeps texting, just for the sake of always responding last?

Anyway, I got my new phone number and waited a couple of days and then I sent Andre a text message, “Hey Andre. It’s been a while. Anyway, I just feel like I don’t like how we left things, and maybe we should just bury the hatchet and start fresh.” And he texted back, “Who is this?” I wrote, “It’s Rob G. Some guy stole my phone a while back and I had to get a new number.” And he wrote. “NP. That’s big of you. Yeah, apology accepted. We’re cool.”

I’m just like, thinking to myself, did I apologize? I didn’t apologize. I didn’t say sorry. And who is he to tell me that my text was big. Is he the dispenser of bigness? Like he’s bigger than me and can somehow award me with a little bit of his infinite supply of big? And what, now this guy’s going to go around and show everybody that text message and tell everyone that I apologized? What do I have to be sorry about? That manipulative jerk. It was an olive branch if anything. And besides, he messaged me first. I should have responded, “apology accepted.” That way I could have been the bigger person while at the same time putting him in his place. And what’s with that NP business? Did he just start using NP when I told him about from my other phone? Or did he somehow catch on to my plan? What a psycho. Seriously, like doesn’t this guy have anything better to do? And now what, we’re friends again? I can’t believe I got played like that. Fucking Andre.