For starters, I'm not having an active momentary crisis with this today, or really at all this year. Aside from what happened with my mother, I've been doing relatively well. And I've certainly been doing well today. But still, I think about my old friend sometimes. And I thought maybe I can reflect on it most clearly when I'm feeling relatively well, rather than when it was all harder to think about.

Been so long since I heard a peep from him. And he slammed all available doors of contacting him long before I ever found out why or that there was even such a deeper problem. And he doesn't want to be found by me, which makes it rather futile to try. I don't miss what he became. But I miss what he once was - at least, what I thought he was. But he had a strong tendency toward mixed signals, and perhaps I never stood a chance of understanding him. I honestly don't know what I understand, versus what I have totally mistaken.

Recently, shortly before my mom's stroke (my mom and dad were with me), I had a (now rare) therapy visit with my autism therapist, who is a psychologist in her own right. We discussed various things, including this disintegrated friendship that left me with so many emotional scars and anxiety triggers (to this day I still can't make new music). I told her, in as much detail as I could scrounge, what happened, from beginning to end. I told her my friend was bipolar, and I'd tried to take this into consideration during the entire friendship. But apparently my story set off some professional alarm bells in her. She told me she couldn't elaborate further for certain without actually meeting my old friend (which is an understandable constraint), but she told me that he was most likely much more than bipolar.

I had not expected to hear that, and I really don't know what to make of it. It seems like, the more insights I glean from what happened, the less I understand it. And all the good I had tried to accomplish in my friendship with him, may never have been enough in the first place. But maybe I'll never quite understand what was going on with him, and why he did the things he did, perhaps simply because he was who he was, and I am who I am.

----

My mom is still in the hospital, in in-patient physical therapy. Her progress is slow but steady. She'll be there for the rest of July at least.