To The Girl Who Used To Be My Best Friend,

I will never get used to using that phrase. Ex-Best Friend. How can two people who were best friends for more than ten years become “Ex-Best Friends?” I still cannot fathom it. It feels like yesterday we were having yet another sleepover and trying to remember whose week it was.

“My house or your house tonight?”
“How about your house so we can watch a movie on the TV in the basement?”

That would have been a normal conversation for us three, maybe four years ago, but now we don’t even acknowledge each other’s presence.

I remember in seventh grade when we had a substitute teacher for our English class and she read us a chapter in a Chicken Soup book. The passage was about two friends--best friends--who eventually drifted apart and stopped being friends once they went to high school. I swore that would never happen to us, despite the fact that we were going to separate high schools. It was impossible; we were best friends and did everything together. Were. We were best friends. It’s funny how that verb works. One day you say “Oh, yes, so-and-so is my best friend. We are practically sisters” and then the day rolls around when you force out the words, “We used to be best friends. We were so close.”

There is not a day that goes by that I do not wish we could go back to the sleepovers and the trips to the mall to try on all the prom dresses in JCPenny’s, but we both know that we can’t. I think the worst part of it is that neither of us saw it coming. One summer we are swimming at your house and going to the lake with my family for the Fourth of July, and the next summer we barely saw each other. We both became busy. Perhaps, I was the one who was busy. Retreats, camps, vacations and trying to maintain a relationship with a guy I had been talking to for months, it kept me busy.

I tried to make time for you, I did. I wanted to include you in every bit of my world. I offered to take you on retreat with me, but you did not want that. We always differed in our faiths. Once junior year came around, we both stopped trying. Some days you would try more than me and I would be exhausted from meetings, practices, rehearsals, and homework. Other days I would try more and you would be busy with your own life and your own friends. I remember meeting your friends once or twice and thinking how I could never imagine you being friends with them. They weren’t the people I expected you to be friends with. That’s when I knew that we were both growing in two different directions.

Everyone goes through stages of personal growth, and it just so happened that ours conflicted with one another. Our lives were leading us in two totally different directions and it clashed and affected our friendship. I’ll never forget the night you said it would be better to consider each other as no longer best friends. Numb. That is how I felt, numb. Not having you as my best friend left me feeling as though I was missing something, like a hand. I was missing the girl I considered my best friend since the young age of five. I was missing the person I used to call everyday after school for hours on end. People used to confuse us for sisters and now we aren’t even friends? I was furious with you, with myself, with God, with everything. How could this happen to us? Why did this happen to us?

My mom always says that years from now we will see each other and put all of that behind us, but right now I’m not ready for that. We are both now in our freshman year of college and are trying to find ourselves. We are both in our own separate ways, waiting for that day, but I know neither of us are ready.

So, my dear Ex-Best-Friend, here is what I want you to know. I can pretend all I want that I do not care and that I am better off without you and that this needed to happen in order for me to grow and for you to grow, but not a day goes by that I don’t wish there was an alternate universe where it didn’t have to happen the way it did. I miss you and one day we will reconcile and put the past behind us. It might not be until we are college graduates and off to grad school. It might not be until one day we meet in the grocery store and one of us has a baby bump. It might not be until we are sending our children off to their first day of kindergarten when we meet again, but know that I am waiting for that day. Know that I miss you and I wish you the best in everything you do. I will always love you.

Sincerely,

An Old Friend