When You Lose A Best Friend

I screwed up and lost you. That’s the bottom line and that’s what crushes me the most.

I was stubborn to accept your happiness because I was too unsatisfied with my own. I was selfish. I backtracked on all the words I spewed to you about your former friends – how they didn’t support you when times were tough, how they didn’t appreciate the vibrancy held inside your smile like I did. Because I was the same. I betrayed you in the worst way a best friend could; I left, when everything inside me knew I wanted to stay.

We used to be inseparable. You were like the sister I never had despite having an older sister of my own. You were an extension of me. You understood my dry, crusty sense of humor. You smiled at my tasteless jokes. You wanted better for me than to hang around the dick next door. You wanted me to have better self-respect because you couldn’t understand how I didn’t view myself the way you saw me: bright, sympathetic, fun – like all the guys I picked never did, and like all the times you tried convincing me.

I look back on those days with a somber remembrance because somewhere along the line, us because we – and we became you and then me. We tried to make it work – to see past the misunderstandings, to rationalize and then to reason. We tried making jokes. We tried seeing it from one another’s perspectives. We atone for what we did – the careless decisions that we stumbled upon that are filled with a regrettable remorse. We become foreign friends whose lives are attached to crimson memories.

I see that you’re getting married – and I congratulate you from the center of my being. I look at you, envious of what you were strong enough to do, all the while hating you for it because of the times I was stuck in my past, too pitiful to accept that I would ever be more than a splintered heart. You were able to love – to fall so innocently in the way love should be. And me, I was damaged. I scoffed at love because I feared, above everything else, that I’d never see it. I had loved once and maybe that was all I got.

Maybe the one would continue to always be the one that got away. I was angry – how come you got everything I wanted so desperately? I saw you slipping further and further away and I couldn’t deal with another loss – of losing companionship of my dearest friend, the one who I’d shared everything with, laughed with, cried with.

Bitterness eradicated my body, and I think to the now, when I couldn’t possibly be any happier. I’ve finally fallen in love again – made plans to marry, to conceive and raise children with the man who my soul quakes for in every sense of the word. And, it makes me regret that at twenty-three, I couldn’t hold true to those ideals you had on your own – that I couldn’t be more happy for you, that I couldn’t be more accepting, that I couldn’t be more selfless and tell you what you deserved to hear from the very start: I want you to be happy, above all else, because someone like you deserves it.