Let’s call her Cynthia.

I met her in 1988, when I worked for a year at a downtown financial institution. Having only ever worked in my family’s auto parts business since I left UWI, it felt like my first real job. Mind you, I was still adrift, unsure of what I wanted to do with my life. Weirdly, despite the uncertainty, I felt grounded, focused. I had a job to do, rather than being a mere figurehead, which is what I was at the shop. I had to report to a supervisor (who once pulled me aside into a vault and airily remarked that my skirt was too short, and then brought her hands up to frame my face before recommending that I comb my hair back in a professional bun), take hour-only-long lunch breaks, and, well, work. To add insult to injury, I had to actually wait an entire month before collecting my salary, which was an actual pay cheque.

Truthfully, I can’t even remember the exact circumstances under which Cynthia and I became friends. I was brought on for a special project in the electronic data processing department: collecting information that would assist the company in becoming fully computerised. The job was often tedious, but working at that company afforded me the opportunity to make friends. I was chronically shy.

Cynthia worked in the secretarial pool. She was not long out of high school and secretarial school, little more than a teenager. It didn’t matter. She was smart, ambitious, and had the great can-do spirit of a girl who’d been taking care of herself for a long time, even though her parents were still alive. I, who’d never been terribly successful with female friendships, was profoundly moved by how she inspired me to cut loose from my pathetic beige existence.

A couple of years later, after I’d once again run into difficulties with the life of repression, I’d resumed at the shop and at my parents’ home. I returned to work with the organisation, this time, in Customer Service. Cynthia was now the branch manager’s secretary. We hadn’t kept in touch with each other in the intervening years, but I was relieved to discover on my first day that she’d been transferred to the Half-Way-Tree branch where I was assigned to. The nervous vomiting that morning had been in vain.

We resumed our friendship as though no time had passed. This time, when I left the company once again, our friendship was mature enough to stand on its own two feet. There were synchronised lunch times, random after-work visits to her family’s home, Christmas parties, buying coloured Pierre Dumas leather-upper pumps from upscale higglers who visited office restrooms, Sunday morning brunches at my apartment, regular weekend jaunts when we, along with other co-workers, would check into guest houses up and down the length of the island, celebrating when she bought her home, when we got new cars. We coordinated our summer vacations together and travelled to New York. Her brothers and sisters were like my brothers and sisters. When she got pregnant, she asked me to be her baby’s godmother.

But there were also dark times: like the trauma of her mother’s death, or when she sobbed her way through the heartbreak of discovering her boyfriend’s unfaithfulness. There was also a dead-of-night call full of angst and rage when she tried to persuade me to drive to her apartment and pick her and the sleeping baby up so we could cruise the streets looking for the boyfriend’s car so she could throw a block into his windshield.

We were two very different people. Chalk and cheese. At the core, though, we were both people who craved friendship. She loved having people around her. She reasoned that it was perhaps because she was from a big family, I, however didn’t care to have that many friends. I was always careful about making the distinction between friends and acquaintances. Acquaintances were a dime a dozen; friends were one in a million.

Cynthia was a friend. And despite our differences, the friendship worked.

So it must have been a giant-sized piece of foolishness that allowed us – me – to ignore the rift that set in, even before she announced, five, six years ago, that she was migrating to Toronto. That was around the time my sister Tanya and her family, too, had decided to leave for greener pastures in Vancouver. I was, of course, devastated. Tanya and Cynthia were a big part of my world. But Tanya I could forgive; Cynthia I could not. Secrets I would never dare divulge to my sister, whom I lovingly nicknamed Chatty Chatty Cathy when we were children, I would to Cynthia. I felt abandoned. To complicate matters, she’d found religion. (She would argue that she found the Lord. But since I don’t believe God can be lost, I’d disagree.) I’d experienced that scene for the better part of my life and it had left me vaguely empty and unfulfilled. She became a drip, and I wanted things back the way they were before. I waited for her to recognise the danger of blinkered God obsession and devotion to the church, but she didn’t. Our conversations became strained because our shared interests magically evaporated, seemingly overnight.

Right or wrong, though, religion had made her softer around the edges. The hardness that had come about after she finally broke up with her boyfriend had departed. Instead of being happy for her, pettily I took note of how feeble-minded she’d become. During this time, she’d been quietly planning to spirit herself and her daughter away to Canada to begin the great reinvention many of us who’ve lived the heartbreak that is our birthright from post-colonialism can only hypothesise about. But because we now rarely spoke I didn’t realise how near we were to the end.

By the time she’d got through with her papers, everything had changed; I couldn’t wait for her to put the miles between us. On the day she left Jamaica, I refused to go to the airport and instead stayed home and worked myself into a frenzy of exhaustion by cleaning my apartment.

These days, we hardly speak to each other. An odd phone call here, a forwarded chain e-mail there. There’s no malevolence, it’s just that we’ve both taken two separate roads. Sometimes friendships go this way. And while I now have a great guy friend as my BFF, there are certain confidences I long to share with a girlfriend. Every now and then I find myself wishing Cynthia was still a substantial part of my life and, looking back through the hazy prism of Time, that I’d been a better friend.