Next Chapter:
The Spring of My Life
As I move from growing up into aging, I’m realizing how much of adulthood is holding onto all the grief and love I still have for the people I’ve lost and the past versions of myself that just don’t have a place in my everyday reality anymore.
Here are my personal current events at the start of this Fire Horse Year: I lost a dear family friend in a sudden car accident this past month. I ended a friendship with someone I thought would be in my life forever. I planned and threw our engagement party (the first party I’ve ever hosted). I finished my contract with the government. I’m buying my own dental practice.
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Chloe Pineda. February 14th, 2026. I can’t begin to describe how painful this has been and is for me everyday. I’ve tried to avoid being around the other people who loved her because I don’t feel like I have the right to be so devastated by her loss. I hadn’t seen her in months when I’d gotten the news of her accident. I didn’t even invite her to our engagement party myself—I asked Arjee to deliver it on both of our behalfs.
On the way to her celebration of life gathering immediately after we all got the news, I threw a fit in the car. I told Arjee that I didn’t want to miss our dinner reservation. That there wouldn’t be time for me to get ready if I went. That if we went, our whole day, our whole lives would be derailed. I made him turn the car around and drive me all the way back home.
Then, as I watched him pull out the driveway again, I yelled at him to stop, to wait. I wanted to go too. I wanted to go, but I felt like I shouldn’t. I felt like I would be intruding on something sacred and private. I felt like if I went, then maybe I would cry, and maybe someone would say “I can’t believe how much Winna was crying. She didn’t even know Chloe like that.” I was already saying that about myself in my mind.
I didn’t know how much I actually loved her until she was gone. To me, she was just my fiancé’s uncle’s partner. You don’t get bereavement time off for that many separations. But I loved her like she was family to me, too. The type that you only see during the big holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. The type that feels like a fixture in the background, constant and expected.
I lost my maternal grandfather three years ago, but I had expected it. He was in his 90s and had dementia. I knew the last time I saw him that it would probably be the last time. But losing Chloe has shaken me in a way I didn’t know was possible. The entirety of my life so far has been shrouded in privilege and good fortune. Very little of it hasn’t turned out the way I expected it to. The man I’m buying a dental practice from clocked me the moment I stepped foot into his office: “You seem very type A.”
I’m a person of control, with whatever value that’s interpreted. Yes, I’m emotional, and I do make aggrandizing posts and use dramatic words in my speaking. But before this, my subconscious belief was that with meticulous planning and incredible foresight, I would be able to prevent devastation. Or, at the very least, inticipate it so well that the systems of my life would cushion me from the blow.
In any case, I take full responsibility for myself and my emotions and the outcomes of my life. But Chloe seemed so periphery to my plans that it never registered to me how much losing her would impact me emotionally. It reminded me that nothing in this life is promised, that my basic understanding of how this all works can change at any time, and that all of our time on Earth is both limited and precious. All we can do is live through it, love each other as much as possible, and do everything we might possibly want and hope to do while we still can.
Chloe would have never read my blog post, but if I could speak to her one last time, I would say this—Thank you for the kindness and light you showed me, even when I had done nothing to deserve it. Thank you for teaching me how much love I’m capable of in your passing.
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I ended a friendship with someone I would have considered a best friend just a month ago, and it feels like I’m grieving two deaths at once.
That term, best friend, is so embarrassing and vulnerable. It’s like saying “I love this person” to everyone you know, and using it inside a friendship is like asking for permission to love them differently from everyone else. Best friendships are comfort tied to expectations. It’s an honor and a commitment.
I expected this person to be present in my life, now and forever. I expected that we would grow old together, laughing and ranting about the same old tired stories over and over again until our last breaths.
I was wrong. I have been wrong about so much.
I hate that as my life changes, so do I. With every disappointment and heartbreak, every success and milestone, I feel myself becoming a truer, brighter version of myself. For the past year, or maybe more, I felt myself shifting away from the girl I was when I wanted to be this person’s best friend so badly.
When I told my fiancé that I could no longer be friends with this person anymore after what happened between us, he said, “She was never a good friend to you in the first place.”
I was shocked he had that perspective. We’d all hung out together so many times. He never mentioned anything like it before.
He said, “She was always late. To everything. She only ever hit you up last minute. She chose men over you all the time.”
I said, wanting to defend her, “Well… I think she was trying to improve by the end.” She told me that she wanted to be on time. That she wanted to be there for me.
I couldn’t stop remembering, though, the times when I sat in my car, counting the minutes until I should leave, and then another twenty after that. How when I got there, she was even more late than I anticipated to the meetings that she scheduled that same day. How many times was that?
On one of my birthdays, when she got there thirty minutes late and then left thirty minutes early from a dinner that lasted for a total of an hour and a half. How she said she couldn’t stay because she had other obligations—those obligations being going to a casino with her situationship at the time. The one she had vented to me about for hours upon hours. The same one who she decided to see instead of going to an ICE protest with me.
“How many other people in your life do you accept that sort of behavior from?”
I said nothing. Because there are no others.
He went on to cite all the times she’d hurt me, all the times he witnessed throughout the past 6 years of our relationship, the times I vented to him about but that I kept from her. All the times I said nothing because I’d already accepted that she couldn’t be what I actually wanted from her.
“I don’t know what sort of friendship you guys had before I knew you. But I know that it never seemed like she cared about you very much.”
I thought about when we were younger, when I was drunk crying on New Years Eve in the backseat of her other friend’s car. How she hid my phone from me so I couldn’t message the guy who’d been hurting me.
I thought about the Galentine’s Day we spent together, printing out pictures of people we hated and pasting them onto a piñata. The rage, the laughter. Baking cookies and playing loteria.
I thought about how she stayed my friend through so many of my most difficult years, when I was intent on wrecking my life over and over again. The times she picked up the phone when I needed her (When was the last time I needed her in that way? I couldn’t remember anymore) (Actually, in the past 6 years, had I ever called her? Or was it always her who needed me?)
We had so many fun times together. I loved her in the way I imagine I would have if she were my own sister. But she isn’t.
We were only related by the circumstances of our lives at any given point.
Eventually, in a progression that happened so slowly that I felt it months, maybe years, before I perceived it, we stopped being in the same stories together. We recounted our lives to one another rather than living it together, and the trajectory of our plot lines became more and more disparate. I couldn’t understand the decisions she was making, even as I continued to defend her. Even as I continued to consider her one of my best friends.
In the new reality of my life, she didn’t fit. But I let her continue walking into and out of it regularly because… I suppose that when I looked at her face, I saw mine in it, too. The one that belonged next to hers in photos. Except when I looked in the mirror, that wasn’t the person I saw anymore.
At the very beginning of our friendship, when we visited San Francisco together, before I ever interviewed for dental school, she lost the bracelet that I gave her for her birthday that same weekend. The bracelet I bought for her because she mentioned how important it was for friends to get her birthday gifts. Because I wanted to be her friend so badly.
It feels like our friendship ended the way it started, with all my love and expectation packaged up for her so neatly. Her nonchalance, her ambivalence towards me and what I had given her. Her wanting, but not reciprocating.
She said over and over again when she told me she wouldn’t be coming to my engagement party, the one I scheduled on a weekend she specifically gave me, after I’d already hired the caterers and the decorative vendor, forgoing consideration for so many other people who love me and who I knew wouldn’t be able to attend if I scheduled it that day, because I understood that she wouldn’t make the effort unless it was convenient for her:
I know I’m choosing something else, but it’s not that I don’t care about you. I wanted to be there.
I knew in that moment, if I had been put in the same situation she was in, I wouldn’t have let her down the way that she did me. But I guess, it’s also that I could never let her down in the same way because she never expected it from me. She was still my best friend, but I wasn’t hers. I never was.
All the time I spent with her, stretched over the last decade of my life, seemed to create meaning when there wasn’t any. Time reveals all, as they say. Time and age and the person I’m revealing myself to be every day. The type of person who can say: No, I will not accept this anymore. Not even from you.
I won’t be spending any more of my precious life being disappointed by her. We had some fun times, but they’re over. And I’m relieved by that.
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I hosted my first party. Yes, my first one, at my big age. It brought up so many of those difficult emotions that I tried so hard to protect myself from as a teenager: rejection, fear of abandonment, insecurity.
I called it an engagement party, because yes, it was celebrating that, but it was also so much more. I think calling it an engagement party was really the only way for me to define for everyone how important it was to me.
Now that it’s over, and I’ve stopped worrying about the costs, where I’ll be seating everyone, what activities to plan, and how much food to buy, I’m realizing that it was probably the most beautiful day of my life so far.
The people who love and care about me showed up in droves. Their arms full of flowers, speaking kind, uplifting words into me. They flew and drove hours and hundreds of miles in from different states just to be there for me. On a day I chose without consideration for their schedules or their convenience.
They came because they understood without my explaining that I needed them there. They came and helped me hold down the table cloths from the wind, they taught me how to pop a champagne bottle, they fed me when I hadn’t eaten, and then they stayed after it was dark, the time long past what I wrote on the invitation so that my house would be clean the next day.
I was shocked by how much they loved me. My life, so full of beauty and friendship, and all this time I had been scared that I was alone in all this. I wasn’t. I have never been. I just couldn’t access that love for so long because I assumed it wasn’t there. I was wrong. I have been wrong about so much, but this time I’m glad.
All the flowers they brought still sit in my kitchen, and in the mornings, I come down to greet that feeling all over again. Surprise and gratitude. The feeling that this time will be different, because this time, I know how precious it is, and I will treat it that way.
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All day, I’m texting a man who owns something that is very precious to him, and I am asking him to trust me with it. His staff, his patients, his decades of work. In exchange for many hundreds of thousands of dollars, of course, but still, priceless in other ways.
I cannot say much yet, but I’m hopeful that this will all work out. The contracts are currently being drawn up, and they feel a bit like an outline for the future. So many decisions to make, disagreements to navigate, the road to closing precarious at times. I feel that way about my life again suddenly, now that I’m free from my obligation to the government—like I’m deciding the path, not just being forced down it. It’s been three years, six years, ten years in the making. A long winter of preparation.
I want it to be good. I want to tread all of this carefully, gracefully, and get back up when I fall. I want to go it with the people who want to be there with me. I’m envisioning some difficult trenches, but mostly, many flowers everywhere. I see them in front of me now.
