#my high school friends were concerned because i spent a week in like. a fugue state. like a zombie as if someone i actually knew had died | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

quintessential-queer-indian-blog · 6 years

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Dear ex-best friend

Dear Anonymous,

There aren’t any words about a friendship that is more heartbreaking than “s/he was my best friend”. Yet, more often than not, this situation arises in everybody’s lives at some point of time. This situation, as dreadful as it is, teaches you a very important lesson in life – nothing lasts forever. Something quite similar happened to me about 2 years back.

I had a female friend, let’s call her Sarah. Sarah and I were classmates since 8th grade, when I first joined my last school (I have studied in a total of 8 schools since kindergarten, the last being my 8th). Even though we were classmates, my interaction with her was always limited to a cursory hi in the hallway. Sarah was very shy and quiet, and she spent most of her time with a tight-knit group of friends that had 2 other girls (who were also my classmates). She was quite above average in studies, and had a special talent for English. When we came to 9th grade, I had started mingling more with my classmates, and by virtue, Sarah and her friends. Very soon, I realised that of all my classmates, I could best relate to Sarah as well as her friends. We had similar taste in TV shows and music and we had a shared contempt for our classmates. By the end of 9th grade, I had been totally absorbed into their group and I was happy, even though this made me an object of ridicule as well as envy among other male classmates of mine. This was especially because one of Sarah’s friends was considered extremely pretty and had attracted the gaze of many classmates.

In 10th grade, we had become one unit – the 3 musketeers and me. This was the time when I had slowly started realising my sexuality. By no surprise, so did Sarah. However, it wasn’t until later that this fact came into the open. We would spend hours group-chatting on Facebook and they would send pictures of Enrique Iglesias and Ian Somerhalder (my first two celebrity crushes). They also introduced me to the world of pop music. In India, when you come to the 11th grade, you are asked to choose a stream – Science with biology, Science with Computer Science, Science with Economics, Commerce etc. When we came to 11th, the group split up. One girl went for commerce, while the pretty friend of Sarah’s went for Science with biology (as she wanted to become a doctor). However, Sarah and I chose Science with Computer Science. This split us up into different classes, including Sarah and I who were in two separate sections. Initially, we still maintained contact and met regularly during lunch and homeroom. However, within a month, we stopped meeting up. We grew apart, so much so that the girl who aspired to become a doctor would consciously avoid making eye contact with my when we passed by each other on the hallways (which I later found out was because of her possessive newly-found boyfriend). Nevertheless, Sarah and I still remained close. With the other two out of the picture, Sarah and I shared a very good relationship. Sarah also introduced me to her new best friend from her class, Anu. Soon Anu, Sarah and I became best friends. Halfway through 11th grade, I came out to Sarah (who was the first person I ever came out to). However, I did not come out to Anu until much later.

High school ended, and it was time to apply to colleges. Anu and I had decided to pursue engineering whereas Sarah decided to pursue architecture. By a freakish coincidence, all 3 of us ended up in the same university (even though that was not the plan for me or Sarah). During the first week of our university education, Sarah confessed something to me – she had developed a crush on Anu. In fact, on Sarah’s 18th birthday, Anu had slept over at Sarah’s place, during which time Sarah tried to kiss Anu in a fugue state, which was met with a hostile reaction from Anu. That explained a lot about why Anu and Sarah hadn’t been talking much. During this time, I was a rock for Sarah. She would often call me and text me for hours, engaging my help to get over Anu whilst not risking their friendship. I complied and helped Sarah. We started spending so much time talking to one another that my parents even suspected that I had a romantic relationship with Sarah (which they were absolutely against). There were multiple instances where we would talk all night about the most random things – movies, actors, schoolmates, music, boys and crushes etc. Sarah also had a hard time coping with the extensive workload of architecture while dealing with the emotional rollercoaster owing to Anu and her erratic friendship with Sarah. Also, it should be mentioned that Sarah and I shared one more thing – we were obese. This also troubled Sarah a lot, as she aspired to have a sleek body and had tried and failed at maintaining a diet.

During the end of our first year, Sarah was at her lowest point – heartbroken, from Anu and her ephemeral bouts of friendship; enervated, from her heavy workload in architecture; isolated, due to her mean classmates in architecture; and disappointed, because she wasn’t thin and pretty. In spite of my company, she felt like she required something else. She posted a confession regarding Anu on a famous confession app on her mobile. Fate struck and someone replied to her confession – a guy from another college, 3 years senior to us, and charming enough to break through the wall Sarah had constructed around herself. I was skeptical about this new internet relationship she has developed with a virtual stranger, and I shared my concerns with her but she refused to consider them. Soon, I started observing a drastic change in her appearance in a matter of weeks. She had started becoming thinner, got a new stylish haircut and started wearing clothes that highlighted her figure. This was accompanied with a change in her behaviour towards me, where she started keeping secrets about the mystery guy, and would often leave me on read while we texted. Then one day, she told me that she was in a committed relationship with this guy, and while she had never met him (because when they did decide to meet, he had already left for a month-long internship in a foreign country), she skyped him often. I was mostly happy for her, with a slight hint of envy as she got all that she wanted; all that we had wanted – to get thin, to look attractive and to be in a relationship. However, being her best friend, I tried my level best to feel unobjectively happy for her.

As our first year ended, she submitted her withdrawal of admission from architecture, and applied to another college for engineering. Thus ended our physical meetings in college. We would still text, however they were now mostly all about how she had reduced by 2 dress sizes and how multiple people stalked her on social media and her clandestine sexcapades with her boyfriend. Whenever she would get the idea that I was bored with the conversation, she would pity me and say: “Aw hun, you will get a boyfriend too. You just need to get out of this godforsaken country” or things like “maybe if you also lost weight…” She would then describe diets and exercises and skin-care routines I could follow in order to become attractive. Even then, we would meet up once in a while, and hang out at the mall. Sometimes, even Anu would join us. Meanwhile, Anu had also gotten into a relationship with one of her classmates. When we would hang out, Sarah would make comments like “Ah it’s so refreshing to just hang out with friends, and no boyfriends” and then accompany it with “Aw hun, don’t worry. Just hang on a bit. We got lucky when we turned 19, maybe you would too”. That is when I began to realise that along with her “extra insulation”, she had also lost her originality – the things that initially attracted me to her. She had started becoming shallow. Her new college and classmates had become her life, along with her boyfriend. Soon, it was me who started a text conversation because we hadn’t talked in so long, and she who would finish the conversation as she had too much to do. This made me feel left out and neglected. Having shared so much about my life with her, it felt hard to restrain myself from telling her about my first love. However, I tried my best to limit my conversation with her. Within a few months, our conversation involved no more than birthday and New year wishes.

Recently, I tried to reconnect with Sarah by sending her a post I found on Instagram that reminded me of her cat. It was then she revealed that she was going to Germany that day. I congratulated her, and said bon voyage, without bothering to ask her why she was going or for how long. The death of a close friendship is hard – and it hit me first, followed by Anu. But Sarah taught me a very important lesson: Never trust or love anyone unconditionally, because people always leave. They would always find someone – a new friend, or a new partner and the person you knew as your best friend is no longer in there. Because with every heartbreak, and tragedy, you lose a part of your personality, your soul, and that changes you completely. Sarah had a hard time during her teenage, and my interaction with her was during that phase. So was Anu’s. When Sarah finally found happiness in her new friends, and her boyfriend, and busy life, she wished to forget all that trauma that she went through when she was depressed and dejected. Along with forgetting her trauma, she also forgot her friends. Maybe some day, she would realise that forgetting her trauma altogether was just an analgesic – to assuage her pain, and that it was that trauma that taught her what happiness meant, and that the people who stuck by her when she was at her lowest were the ones who truly cared about her. Maybe that day she would realise that getting over her, as a best friend, was the hardest thing I ever had to do, as it wasn’t half as easy for me as it was for her. Then again, she was my best friend; who was to say I was her’s?

Anu and I still remain friends. We may not be as close as we were, but we have shared a lot of memories. Maybe some day, Anu and I might also fall apart. Who knows? But at least this time, I can be sure of one thing: I won’t be left heartbroken when another person walks through my life and leaves. We make lots of friends during our lifetime. Some are friends for life, and some are friends for a season. The important thing to remember is that at the end of the day, you are left with only one person in your life – you. So take good care of yourself and be that best friend you’ve always wanted to yourself. After all, you can’t walk through your own life and leave. In that bleak note, I leave you today.

Until next time.

#life lessons #best friend #loss #friends #self love #story

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