I brag about how much better I have it than everyone else. I tell it loud and clear that my home friends are, quite literally, the best thing on earth for me. I even thought they could do no wrong: which is by any logic an unreasonable expectation of any human being, and I was shown that last week.

Try as I might, I can't find any criteria by which I can justify this event, this course of [in]action that was taken. It hurts more than I can express that I have searched long and hard for a way to patch or darn—or even duct tape, dammit—things back together to the exactly way they used to be, and cannot. For one, it worries me that they didn't see that the truth, no matter how painful (and it wasn't, at all), is much preferable to the obscuring of it. I was startled to find that, perhaps, they didn't know me as well as I'd imagined. Yes, I was told the evening before the mass exodus, but it happened late and it was with dread. And I was the only one, out of five or so, who was told.

Here's what else gave me that blank, queasy feeling in my stomach: group inaction. Every single person in the know also knew that we didn't know. They, to greater or lesser extents, may have had twinges of doubt, but ultimately nothing was done. Geez. It's the sort of condoning that let Hitler overrun central Europe before anyone batted an eye.

It didn't happen out of malice. I can see that what has transpired hurts them, too, lots. The ones who matter have apologized a dozen times. each of them as sincere as it was difficult. They have always been, and always will be, good people; they are my good friends. This one event can't negate the thousands of small and wonderful acts and thoughts that have have woven us inextricably together. One day, a day I hope is sooner rather than later, this bewildered sadness really will have faded almost clear away.

But here's the thing. I'll forever hope to goodness that, were I ever to be put in the same situation, I wouldn't handle it in the same way: I hope that I would find the courage and the brashness and the indecorousness to call foul. I do not ever, ever want to be responsible for anybody else's disillusionment of this scope. Yet—if the best things on earth can screw up in this big a way, what can be expected from everybody else? What is inevitable for myself?

I'm scared.