This is a long one - and kind of bizarre (at least for me) - so declare yourself a hero (or a saint, whatever you like more) if you've read it till the end.
So my best friend that I intensively talked with the majority of the days - albeit mostly via chat (as in text), though we also had occasional visits and increasingly long phone calls - for 8 years has ghosted me for 9 weeks after he disappeared in the middle of a conflict we had (before which we talked pretty much every day since the end of the last hiatus which was in the end of October), after those 9 weeks I finally reached out to him via whatsApp (we usually talk via Telegram but he didn't respond there anymore) and he answered: 'yes, but I don't want anymore contact'.
Now I need to give some context so maybe what happened can make more sense. So we're both guys with autism, certain (rare) shared values and in many ways similar personality types which gave a lot of talking fuel over the years, we basically shared everything including how our days were going and we've had a lot of laughs together.
One unhealthy aspect has been again that we chatted a lot more than we called or visited but that has been improved over the years (again, having long phone calls, gaming and visiting each other for fun activities), and yes, another thing is that we probably spent too much energy on each other in general (we both have other 'friends' but we are far less close with them than with each other in many ways).
Now this is someone who had a complex history of emotional neglect and an unhealthy family dynamic, basically his mother and sister taking in all the emotional space while his father couldn't express himself emotionally and he himself (as the youngest family member) had to constantly be hypervigilant around them and wasn't safe to express how he felt, this in turn (along with just sheer unluckiness) made him meet and attract other people (mostly women with borderline traits and one with NPD) who also ended up treating him very badly, and yes, that included ghosting, which he hated.
Needless to say this significantly hindered his trust in others and his ability to form safe connections and throughout the years he very regularly shared about that with me as well and I've supported him as best I could through difficult times which he often said he was grateful for (and yes, I also shared my struggles with him sometimes - albeit less frequently - which helped).
It's also worth noting we've both always been very self-aware and reflective and after we've had any type of conflict we'd be able to admit our wrongdoings (including just sloppy communication). I think it's fair to say that we both lived with the philosophy that we never bullshit each other and were always honest with each other, even when we disagreed (which makes the time we say we do agree more valuable, which we both agreed on), and I noticed that after resolving conflict our ways of communicating like adults improved, though again most of that happened via chat, which we both agreed on caused lots of miscommunication, but we did anyway, I guess because it felt more safe in some way, and out of habit.
Now the topics of conflict varied but usually - just like last time - they stemmed from something in the trend of him expressing hopelessness and that he thinks people have permanently damaged him and that everything that happened to him was unnecessary and can **never** be worth it. Now I've always validated those feelings of him and I think it is important to be able to process your emotions without you and the person you're telling it to (in this case me) immediately grasping for solutions or posing the question: 'now what?'.
At the same time I also acknowledge the danger of spiraling into negative (self-reinforcing) thought loops if we don't eventually also ask ourselves these very questions, so over the years I've become more sensitive to noticing that the focus on just ruminating on how hopeless he felt and the focus on finding a solution were not balanced and I kept driving the point home that it's healthy to be able draw the distinction between reality and what you're feeling, that I'll never invalidate what he feels but once he starts making what seem like objective statements about reality like: 'it can't **ever** be worth it' or 'that thing you're proposing can **never** work' while everything he says strongly indicates to me that he is not even trying to understand that thing - in these kinda discussions he often later admits that thinking about solutions is too painful for him since it collides with his lack of a believe that anything can help him at all - there is a chance I disagree with him and I will be honest about it, especially if I feel that not doing that would enable that self-defeatist spiraling.
I also want to make clear that I don't believe he doesn't take any steps that could help him improve his situation, he does, it's just that that the way we're talking about these issues often feels counterproductive and draining. But, when I tell him that, he tends to interpret that as talking about it (so much) in the first place is the problem (even though he keeps doing it) but I keep telling them it's the **way** we talk about it that matters more. You see, I'm not ChatGPT, I also have emotions and empathy, so when he continuously shares all that hopelessness with me for years I also feel that pain and when he's not open for focussing on solutions I myself feel stuck with that emotion.
Long story short (or maybe it's too late for that now, lol) 9 weeks ago we had another conflict which seems not much different from earlier conflicts we had and was basically about the things I mentioned above, and in the middle of that he just dissappeared. Now he has done that before (partly because of his Avoidant personality disorder (AvPD)) and all those times after a few weeks or a month he came back and we talked it out like adults, other times he even announced that he needed to disappear for a certain amount of time because he knows I don't like to sit with the uncertainty, but this time he didn't do any of that.
So after 9 weeks, the period in which we both had our birthday and he didn't reach out to me for mine and he ignored my birthday wishes for his, I reached out to him (like I said in the beginning) via WhatsApp and his response was that he didn't want to stay in contact. I told him that he didn't tell me that and that his coping of disappearing like that has been very frustrating for me (especially considering my desire to solve conflict quickly) and that I'm still willing to try to resolve it to where we both feel understood and safe to share what we want, even if that means that I might need to do certain things differently.
His reaction to that was: "I could have said it earlier, sorry, I wish you the best but I can't see how I can continue this friendship." needless to say this still leaves me with lots of questions and it feels like this 'apology' doesn't carry the weight of what he did to me. Keep in mind he only told me this **after** I reached out to him after 9 weeks, so if it wasn't for me reaching out, who knows when he would have said it, if **at all**
Now my question is do I say anything else to him after his last response? On one hand I'm afraid that if I don't tell him his excuse didn't feel sufficient he will believe it is, on the other hand it does feel kinda wrong that I need to be the one telling him it's not sufficient instead of him realizing that himself, I might spend even more energy into it when he himself is not, I also don't want to overstep any boundaries (he has been clear he doesn't want any more contact). A.I. chatbots advice against saying anything more to him, but they did advice me to write an 'unsent letter' (so he never actually receives it) to him to process emotions.
I respect his wish to end the friendship, but I hate the way he did it.
Again, thanks a lot for reading till the end.