Is there anything worse than the feeling you get when you realize that the way you feel about a person isn't being reciprocated?

The past few weeks have been some of the worst in my life, and I've had some hard weeks. Erin, my fiancee, has a lump in her breast. I'm still holding out hope that it's an infection but her doctor told her that if that's the case than it should go down after a little while. It's been weeks now and it doesn't seem to have gone down. I'm worried that it's a cyst. I know that even if it is a cyst that doesn't mean it's cancer, but that's it. That's the elephant in my room, in my world right now. Erin's doctor told her to wait a few weeks before she made another appointment just to see if the lump goes down. I've been pushing her to get another appointment. She promised me last week that over the weekend she'd make a new one. I'm still waiting for her to do it.

I've been living in a sort of hell of the unknown since this all began.

I'm slowly coming to realize that a friend of mine whom I care about may not feel the same way towards me. I don't mean this in any romantic way, I simply mean that I feel like the friendship me and let's call her Amy have has been more of a one way street. A while ago her and I were very close. Never romantically, that's not the point, and I don't want you to think that. We were just good friends. She helped me through some very tough times in my life, she always seemed to be there for me when I needed and I try to do the same for her.

I know that distance causes all kinds of stress on friendships. And I know that it can be difficult to keep up with phone calls and emails. Believe me, I'm horrible at keeping in touch. My friends are the most patient people in the world because they put up with the wait that can often occur between my emails.

Still, I do my best to return emails, even if they are late. That doesn't seem to be the case with Amy. It's hard for me to think about this because I don't want to think that I've lost a friend, or to think that whom I thought was a friend might have only been so in my head. I barely ever hear from Amy anymore. I still email her but hearing from her seems to occur as often as a blue moon. It makes me wonder does she care? The fact that I care about her makes me want to think that she cares about me but maybe she doesn't? That realization sucks.

The weird thing is her emails used to be really open. I knew how she was doing, what she'd been up to, the last c.d she bought, the best movie she'd seen in a particular month, and all the little things that friends talk about, like what's wrong with the world and how together we can make it better, if just a little bit. I have a problem with talking to about me all the time, I hate this problem, I try to avoid it by just not talking. Part of it's shyness, and part of it's intentional because I don't like to talk about myself but there's the problem when I get one of her emails it's always impersonal, like here I am this person who she knows so much about but she's stopped letting me into her world, I do all the talking, and I feel like I'm talking to myself.

I think when you love someone you can never look at them differently. Whether it's a lover, an ex, a soulmate, a family member, or a friend. The new Band of Horses album has a song on it called "Detlef Schrempf" and the hook had me on the verge of tears when I first heard it, "My eyes can't look at you any other way." I love my all my friends. I would die for the close ones. We all have friends who we haven't talked to since elementry school, I don't think of them as former-friends, I think of them as friends who I just have seen in a long time. Amy is a close friend of mine. No matter what happens between her and I, I will always continue to think of her as my friend, and nothing can change that. It's just the way I am. But talking to yourself isn't the best way to have a conversation. Espcially when your life feels like it's going to hell and you need a friend to talk to.