To My Old Best Friend

That One From Health...

Perhaps our friendship is that of one that was never supposed to happen. A friendship that was an anomaly in space and time that could only ever be corrected with an explosive end that left fragments permanently embedded in our very souls forever. For, if not placed in the same Health class the summer before our freshman year, neither a word nor an interaction would've likely ever happened between us. I nervously spoke to you in that class solely due to the fact that you were a familiar face in a middle school yearbook floating in a sea of faces I couldn't recognize. I was doing partner work with you without knowing you would be the boy that would become my best friend as fast as you would become just a familiar face among all the others.
You would never admit it to my face, but I know you never thought I was the brightest. Or the most clever. And most certainly not the smartest. You lived on your high horse of advanced academic courses while I struggled through a basic Biology class. You described us as street smart and book smart, and I would always only just be the former. I never cared about that though, always considered a certain kind of smart better than nothing. Our friendship was a dangerous one, but I could never see the warning signs past my absolute admiration for you. You were everything to me. I couldn't fathom how I had gotten lucky enough to meet you. You were the one person that understood me and my humor and quirks perfectly. We told each other secrets of the utmost scandal and embarrassment, but neither you nor I cared. We were two teens that showed our trust in one another with games of Truth or Dare during the darkest parts of the night with words never to be uttered to anyone but each other. We laughed and loved and cried with one another, and never saw the danger signs in front of us. Our friendship was a bomb filled with a raging stubbornness that had the will to go off whenever it pleased.
And it did.
We fought like any friends did, but when the catastrophic explosion of hateful words and resentful texts sent debris into my heart and soul... It was like I just knew it was for the last time. I compare the time of our fallout to that of a mourning process. Can you mourn the death of a friendship? I felt as though it was a living being that had passed away and I was going through the stages of grief. Denial came first. We fought before, our stubbornness sometimes making petty arguments turn into week long affairs. Certainly, certainly this was the same thing? Anger soon followed, when days transitioned to weeks and then months without a single word from you, a rage began to build. I scorned your very existence, sent dirty looks to the back of your head as you walked by me as if you never knew me, and allowed your name to slip past my lips with only colorful language accompanying it. However, like the stages of grief say, bargaining eventually came knocking. I plotted with your friend, begged for him to tell you to speak to me... to at least acknowledge me. All I received from you was messages left on read, and more avoided looks in hallways. This pushed me right into stage four: depression. I wondered how I could've let our friendship fall apart. How could I have ruined something that had made me so happy? For months, I watched you live happily and couldn't hardly stare for more than a few moments before the overbearing sadness forced me to look away for fear of falling apart where I stood. It was hard to fight back those feelings, but it's been a year and I finally feel as though I've entered the final stage. Acceptance. I sit two rows away from you in an advanced English class, and I see you three times a week. I no longer wonder everyday how you are and although I cannot bring myself to meet your eye or laugh at the numerous jokes that leave our peers in hysterics, I'm okay with that. I'm content with it.
I often used to wonder if you went through this grief as well. If there was any point in time when you wish you could come visit my cat and tease me about his weight one more time. If you wish we could go ice skating and laugh so hard when one of us fell that the other would topple down too. I wonder if saying my name now hurts, like how it still sometimes hurts to say yours. I don't know if I want you to experience the grief I felt losing you, or if I would never wish it upon you.
           For a long time, I did wish bad upon you. I wished for burdens and hardships to be laid on you, and only now do I realize I don't want that at all. I want far from it. I've come to realize I want you to succeed in any and every single goal you ever described to me in most vivid detail as we laid under the stars. I just can't see you do it. I can't, not when I'll always wish I was standing next to you as you achieved them. I fear that even from afar if I watch you do all that you promised you would, the resentment that once coursed through my veins would reappear with a vengeous for anyone that would be standing at your side. So here's my chance to say good luck. Please go to that college you've wanted to go to for years. Don't let your family hold you back from your dreams. And please don't ever become a dog person, my cat still loves you. So, yes, our friendship was an anomaly and although it ended as it was destined to... It is quantifiably impossible to say just how grateful I am that it happened.

Sincerely,
a girl missing a certain boy a little extra on a cold winter night