friends & awkwardness

My best friend from college called me last night. I deliberately let it go to voice mail, and despite expecting this reaction, I was still shocked at the amount of negativity I felt toward his voice when I finally listened to the message this morning. It wasn't anything he said. It was a typical message: "Haven't talked to you in a while, was wondering how you were doing. I'm busy as usual; law school's really keeping my hands tied. I went to India last month, and I'm dying to tell you about that ..." blah blah blah

It wasn't the message itself ... what bugged me was his sentence intonation. He has a way of raising his voice at the last couple of words or so of a sentence, any sentence, sentence after sentence after sentence. The mere thought of that intonation makes me angry, and I have no idea why.

He and I really were best friends in college, especially the first couple of years. As all cross-gendered friendships go, there were times when the friendship/relationship boundary was not so clear, but we got through it all and each graduated vowing to stay BFFs forever.

And then we just grew apart. We stopped really keeping in touch, and every time we talked on IM or on the phone, I felt more distant from him than the last chat. In the few years since college, he got engaged (they had started dating during college), then got married, then just went on living life. Through all of this, I cared less and less about his world. I ran out of conversational pieces with him, questions to ask him about his life, questions to ask him about their life together, and I didn't so much feel like sharing my life details either.

With each chat or phone call, the conversations got more and more awkward. We don't talk much (maybe a couple of times a year), so in a way, we've still been able to keep up the pretense of BFFs despite the awkward conversations, but really only in name. True BFFs would never run out of things to share, no matter how long they've been physically apart leading separate lives and being out-of-touch.

So I know that I should really call him back. He's definitely making an effort to stay in touch with me. I should reciprocate. But honestly, it's just such a mental block to me right now. I keep finding excuses for why it'd be inconvenient to call him right now, why I should wait until I've done my laundry, and then after my laundry I excuse that it's really too late, I should call him tomorrow ... etc. etc. etc. ...

I have to do it. I have to pick up the phone and just dial. But man, those sentence intonations are all that's running through my head, and they do nothing to help me pick up the phone.