I knew I loved with my best friend before I even knew that he was my best friend. I knew I loved him the second that I wasn’t allowed to. I knew he liked me long before I knew I liked him. For starters, he made it blatantly obvious and I’m fairly confident everyone knew he liked me.
I don’t think there is one distinct moment you fall in love with someone. I also don’t think you fall in love with just one person. I fell in love with the boy standing in the middle of the street with arms wide open as I left the church following my grandma’s funeral. I fell in love with the boy who remembered that I had a secret obsession with Alanis Morissette and would always play it in the car. I fell in love with the boy who started wearing green pants just because I pointed out that all he wore was various shades of brown. I fell in love with a boy whose love I didn’t deserve.
Every relationship has happy, pure moments that are unforgettable, but there also exists bad moments, terrible even, and we had a lot of those, but those happy moments made the bad one seem less important. At times, things that happened within our relationship were things that only happened in movies. I told my best friend that I fell in love with him for the first time in the middle of the parking lot after school. Little did I know that conversation would end with me sitting in my car, alone, for 45 minutes sobbing so uncontrollably I couldn’t even drive. That was the first and last time I told someone I was in love with them.
A long time passed until he made me cry again. I say he made me cry, but this time, it was out of his control. My best friend left for college just 6 days after graduation. He had so many people to see and so many things to do, we only saw each other 2 of those 6 days, and one of them was his graduation party, where I was accompanied by 30+ other people who were going to miss him. I was the last to leave, not exactly leaving him with the best last image of me. I told my mom I would be home at 11. There it was 11:30, I’m sitting in the driver’s seat and he was leaning on the window frame. As I’m ready to leave, I break. I’m crying and I could barely manage to explain why. I managed to get out a pathetic sounding “I don’t want you to go”, though I was well-aware that there was no choice. I’m confident that I cried more over the next 5 days than I had in my entire life. I was mad that he was gone, which was stupid, because it wasn’t his fault. I didn’t cry because he was gone, I cried because I could no longer see him pretty much whenever I wanted to. I cried because I was about to go from seeing someone I loved almost everyday of my life, to knowing that I wouldn’t see him until Christmas break.
After 5 days, I stopped crying. We had gotten into a huge fight and things ended, whatever ‘things’ were. We didn’t talk for almost 3 months, and when we did start talking again it wasn’t friendly, but awkward, passive, and slightly hostile. As time went on, we talked here and there and it became more like it used to be, but it would never be the same. Talking to the best friend that I lost is one of the few things that makes me genuinely happy and literally puts a smile on my face.
While it is risky and can be scary, being in love with your best friend is one of the best things that could ever happen to you. Despite the fact that things didn’t go as either of us hoped, I’m so lucky to have been loved by someone so great, and to have someone in my life, who meant so much to me that his absence caused me to cry 5 nights in a row, each time for over an hour.
I’m happy to have fallen in love with my best friend, and I’m not mad that I still am.
