u/Hedum_Icarus

Hello reddit. This is my first ever post here, but I'm a long time lurker. So this is something that happened recently. Me, 29 F, and my best friend, 28 F, have been very close for a couple of years. For context, I've moved around cities a lot in the last 5 years and making lasting friendships have been really hard under this circumstances. I have a husband, M 29, who has always been there for me, he's my partner and my best friend but I don't think it's fair to him to only have him to rely on. We moved to a new city after living together for a while and I wanted to take the opportunity of a new place to make a real effort to form real friends and community. The truth is that this is harder than it sounds, being an adult and all. I've meet wonderful people I consider friends, but I don't see much of them. We might hang out sometimes, see each other at parties and support each other in personal projects, but it has never become closer than that, that was until I met this friend. We meet at an event and clicked immediately, we went to eat pizza together and the friendship was sealed. When I met her, I also met her best friend, M 32, who also became good friends with me and my husband. We basically became a group of 4 that would hang out every weekend, go to events, parties, out to eat, stay for movies, etc. We became really close fast, but she and I were closer to each other. After a while she was even staying at my house to sleep, hace breakfast and even home office when she could or when she needed to (she lives far from the city so sometimes it just made sense). When my husband and I could finally afford to move to a bigger place and buy our own furniture, we took that friendship into consideration when buying a sofa-bed so she could stay over more comfortably. We made plans for the far future. I started considering her my best friend, even tough I didn't say it outloud, I thought it was obvious. We fast-forward to a few weeks ago. I've been noticing that she's been pulling away but she's also just had a rough couple of months. She had a fight with her best friend, the guy mentioned before, and their friendship was not getting better. She was desvastaded and so was my husband and I. We stayed close, provided comfort, heard her out multiple times, just normal friend stuff. I attributed her distance to this depressive episode she was experiencing. I kept being close even as she kept pulling away, sometimes saying hurtful things to me or just being annoyed at me the few times we saw each other. Around this time, my husband had to travel for work (this happens often) and I was left alone in our apartment. Now, as I said before, I know people but I just don't think I have any strong friendships, aside from her. I also don't have any family in this city and my closest family member lives 8 hours away. One friday, close to midnight I was watching a movie alone when all of the sudden I got this horrible pain that kept getting worst and worst to the point where I couldn't walk properly and I couldn't stop crying. I was particularly scared because I have only one kidney and it was region that hurt the most and felt tender to touch. I started panicking and reached out to my husband who didn't really know what to think either. We don't have medical insurance and we even tough we have savings it's not that much money, so an ambulance was not an option. My husband wanted me to go to the ER but it was late, I was very obviously in pain and not very sane of mind and my country is quite a dangerous. Leaving someone to go to the hospital in a taxi alone, at night, in that condition is not really an option, so my husband proposed to call my friend and have her come with me to the hospital. Now, she lives far away from the city, about an hour away (it's a lot here), so we knew that the taxi could be kind of expensive. When my husband called her, told her what was happening and what he was proposing he also stated that we will pay for all her taxis and any expenses, he just needed to know I was safe. This is what my husband recalls: he stopped talking and she just remained quiet. He kept going on about the plan and she suddenly said "can I think about it and call you back?" When he insisted that all she had to do was be by my side she just said "I'm sorry, I just don't think I can do that" the conversation ended there because my husband was too stunned to speak. He proceeded to call another friend who wasn't as close, but lived near me and she inmediatly got into a cab and arrived at my door 10 minutes later. The only thing that I heard from my friend was a text message that read something along the lines​ of: "Husband told me, sorry I can't be there. Feel better". I won't bore you with the details of my diagnostic, it's nothing critical but I had my colon so inflamed it stopped digesting food. That was were the pain came from. Over that week I spend a lot of time doing tests, visiting doctors and eventually I got it under control (can't eat anything anymore but at least I'm not in pain). She follow up once with a vague "I hope you're doing better". Now a few weeks have gone by and I started feeling like myself again. During the treatment of the inflammation I was very depressed and a lot of it came from her indiference (although a lot was due to my body as well). I had other friends who showed up as soon as they found out, they were keeping an eye on me and my health, constantly asking if I needed anything or of they came come visit, that felt like the knive twisting because I'm not nearly as close to any of them as I am with my friend! I started focusing on these friendships because they were there for me and I felt that maybe I didn't appreciate them fully until now, just because we didn't see much of each other. This inevitably meant that I kept pulling away from my friend and now she's noticed. She's changed completely. She's following​ up with me and how I'm feeling, asking to visit, talking sweet to me with words like "love" "sweetheart" "precious baby" that even before this whole thing, were rare. She keeps sending​ me a lot of messages even when I don't reply, sends me a ton of memes and videos, comments on my IG stories and all seems like too much. I'm dealing with my health, a newly rediscovered fear for food, I was recently layed off and I just don't have the energy to deal with her because it still hurts. To put it simply, I'm ignoring her and I'm starting to feel bad about it. So... AITAH for giving my best friend the silent treatment?