15 Things You’ll Do When You Think About Your Ex-Best Friend
A best friend breakup lives among those life experiences that don’t quite have names. They exist in that weird grey area. They happen, but we don’t talk about them. They are not the same as relationship breakups, but can, many times, be just as painful, if not more so. We never expect a friendship to end, especially not one from childhood. We had been through so much, which is probably why when we stopped being friends, it hit harder. It’s sad. It sucks. We want their friendship, but we think it’s for the best, but then we don’t know if it’s for the best. So, yeah.
1. You want to be happy for their successes, but what you end up doing is comparing your life to theirs, as if there is this latent competition you both are complicit in, but have never actually admitted out loud.
2. The competition is: whoever’s life is better, wins the breakup.
3. You will vacillate between two extremes: feeling incredibly petty over this friendship ending and feeling incredibly righteous about it. It was either the stupidest reason to break up a friendship over or the best, with really no inbetween.
4. You will scan through the years of your friendship and pull out past transgressions to fan the flames of your burning relationship.
5. You will look at their Instagram or Facebook and scrutinize their public life and you’ll pick out their flaws, downgrade their achievements, and generally feel pretty awful about yourself while you do this.
5. You will find yourself unable to sleep one night, years after your friend breakup, with the most persistent urge to send a conciliatory email.
6. …Only to remember that if you reconcile, you’ll have to be friends with this person again and all the memories of the pain you endured during your friendship come flooding back in.
7. But, you’ll miss them. You’ll miss how they knew you. You’ll miss the few very special and unique parts of your friendship that you can’t seem to recreate with anyone since then.
8. Because you two essentially grew up together, there’s a weird mix of pride and jealousy that was prevalent in all the years of your friendship. You still feel that from time to time.
9. There’s a silent suspicion that your mutual friends have chosen sides and, even though you’re still Facebook friends, you know they’re not really your friends anymore.
10. You will, from time to time, wonder if you two have grown out of whatever broke your friendship up and you’ll speculate as to if there will be a time when the friendship will be revisited or reconciled, if ever.
11. So many of your memories of middle or high school have them in it and sometimes it just plain sucks that you can’t call them and be like, “Remember that guy from drawing class? Yeah, someone actually married him.”
12. All gossip from high school is lame without your friend to dish it with.
13. And, sure, you two are probably different now and have grown up and maybe you could get past both the significant and petty issues you had within your friendship, but maybe you couldn’t. Maybe this is life. Maybe you grow out of people and that’s okay. It doesn’t make you a bad person and it doesn’t make them a bad person. It just makes you both two different people who no longer need to be in each other’s life.
14. But, still, fuck, sometimes you miss them like they’re a missing limb. Because, as much as you’ve moved on and met other friends, there’s still a place in your life that has never been filled and, while that might seem like an overdramatic response to losing a friend, it seems fitting. You spent every day with this person for years and now they’re just… gone.
15. It sucks. 
