The summer going into my senior year of high school, I was dumped at Starbucks. If there was a list of cliche break-ups, this would be pretty high on the list. However, it was not a boy that dumped me, rather my best friend. The girl who I thought would be at my side when I said "I do." The girl that knew my family's garage code and would hang out around the house when we were away on vacation. The girl that I was thoroughly convinced would be my best friend for life.
Like many break-ups, I knew it was coming. We had been picking petty disagreements with one another, resulting in the nasty, hurtful fight over a boy a month previously — lame, I know. Knowing each other so well as meant we knew how to hurt one another with our words. Like all 17-year-olds, we were changing and no longer the awkward freshmen who sat on the ground in a hallway during lunch. Neither party is at fault for that.
However, knowing that doesn't take away the sting of hearing "We can't be best friends anymore."
When I got home, I paced around my bedroom, yelling at how I hated her and how she treated me. My parents sat and listened, allowing me to release this angry catharsis. Until I finally sat down on the couch in exhaustion and began to weep for the lost friendship. Anger wasn't the primary emotion, rather the overwhelming sadness and grief.
While I would like to say that I haven't faced anything similar since, that is a bold-face lie. Over the last three years, some additional friendships disintegrated. Some due to loss of connection and drifting apart, others as the result of fights — though I haven't been officially dumped since. As children, we hear the phrase "Best Friends Forever," but in reality, very few friendships stand the test of time. As a society, we look at grief only in tandem with death, when really the loss of friendships can result in a severe grieving period.
We struggle to come to terms with what went wrong. We hold onto anger, while looking back at the past memories with fondness. We attempt to make sense of how someone we use to love with all of our heart could hurt us so deeply. When they're brought up, we smile and say that you still care about them, when behind closed doors we wish ill-will. While grief of a death and a loss friendship are different, the grief that accompanies the loss of a friendship is convoluted, a hybrid of anger and sadness, whereas grief of death is straightforward. We reexamine the past, looking for any clues that we missed of what was to come. Did we miss the signs? Was this always in their nature, that we were too blind too notice? In the end, we will never know. But, the upside to grief is that it leads to acceptance.
To all the friends and friendships that I have grieved about over the years, I wish you all the best and hope that you found the people that provide you what I never could. While losing you sucked more than I knew, I found peace in your absence.
