I’m going to preface this post with the fact that this
subject is hard for me to talk about, but because I want this blog to be more
than superficial crap, here it is anyways.
Freshman
year was a real disaster for me, it was a new school with kids I’ve never met
before, and with classes that I never even heard of (transferred from a charter
school to a religious school). Kids mostly ignored me, and I had few people
that I’d call real friends. There was one positive thing that came out of this
though, I had developed a deep friendship with a girl that was so different
from me. She was social, involved, and was always positive, plus she was smart.
I, on the other hand, had almost no friends, and barely knew of any events in
our grade. We had real conversations that could last hours, and really took the
time to get to know each other. When there was a crisis in her life, I was the
one she called for first. The major difference was that we had different friend
groups, but the knowledge that I was her go to was enough to keep me content
with that situation. Freshman year ended, and then everything changed. Over
sophomore year, our friendship started to deteriorate. By January, I could have
been any other girl in the grade to her.
The thing is
though, was that this hurt me a lot. It hurt to know that someone I shared so
much with, could so easily forget me. This wasn’t like any other girl in the
grade, she knew the real me. I could always write off the lack of friends by
the fact that the others never knew me, so it had no saying on my character.
Remember when I said that this girl was the opposite of me, it showed. On
social media, I was constantly bombarded with her pictures with her other
friends and how happy she looked. I usually saw these posts while I was alone
and home for the millionth week in a row. I was in shock that she could be so
happy pretending that there was never a relationship between us.
I’m an extremely loyal person, once I decide
that I like you, I will fight for you and always stand by you. I tried to fight
for her, even mentioning that I felt like we were drifting, when she said that
she still felt the same was about me but was busy. Maybe I shouldn’t have fought,
because it had no impact. When I tried
talking to her, it was if I didn’t exist. I always knew that she seemed to lose
focus on me when around her other friends, but now I lost the comfort of
knowing that she trusted me with all of her secrets.
The moment
that I knew I had to admit defeat was my birthday. Freshman year, she had
bombarded me with happy birthday texts and demanded that we go to lunch and see
a movie together that weekend. We spent that whole day together, and laughed at
the lame romance movie we saw. After, she put up a post on Instagram saying how
much she cared about and loved me, filled with inside jokes. That seems so
trivial, but in my school, that was the major way to declare love for a friend.
Sophomore year, she sent a generic HBD into our grade group chat, and left it
at that.
Every time
I saw her, I would wonder why. Why don’t you care? Why wasn’t I good enough?
And the most painful; How could you forget me? These were the questions that
would eat me up alive, and kept me up for hours.
Junior year
rolled around, and I decided that I was done wondering. Deep down I knew why,
but the fact that I might’ve been wrong was enough to drive me to ask her. I
imagined exactly how this conversation would go down: I would see her in the
halls, stop her, and ask her the simple question of whatever happened to our
friendship. She would look at me, and I would see this sadness and nostalgia in
her eyes, and she would say she didn’t know but was sorry that it was gone. We
would conclude that it was pretty great, and promptly move on with our lives.
Except, that’s not how it happened at all.
I couldn’t
find any time to pull her aside at school, and decided that I couldn’t keep letting
this bother me. Instead, I texted her a screenshot of me typing can I talk to
you to her, and made it appear like I was going to send this to someone else. I
knew exactly what I was doing, but didn’t have the courage to just send can I
talk to you. She asked what, and when I said now face to face, she pretended
that she didn’t see it. Cue her walking off the bus (we both take it to get
home), and she responds why. I realize that this is a catastrophe, and just say
never mind. She then proceeds to say it must be about something, and I make the
ballsy move to ask her about our friendship. The response cracked my heart into
a million pieces.
“You meen
when we were freshman? People grow apart and change. I haven’t thought about
that in forever. We also have really different friend groups…” is basically the
response that I received. And yes, the spelling error was intentional. This
message taught me two things: she never cared about me and that I needed to
move the fuck on. The not thinking about that line was the first dagger in my
heart, I had been torturing myself for almost a year, when she wanted me to
know that she had given zero cares. The line about different friend groups
taught me that never cared about me. When you really care and love someone, you
don’t care who they associate with. You value them as a person and find a way
to spend time with them. Now for the people who think that it might have genuinely
been hard for her to separate from her group, WE RIDE A 45 MINUTE BUS RIDE
TOGETHER TWO TIMES A DAY, where only one of her friends rides. Sorry if you
felt like I was yelling, but just wanted to shut that down as quickly as
possible.
So how do I
deal and what did I learn from this? I realized that I need to stop letting
shitty people get to me. I can’t trust other people to stay in my life, and
that I need to be okay when it does happen. Because, I’m ninety-nine percent
sure that someone in the future will stop caring about me, just because that’s
just the way life is. And that if something is bothering me, to not wait forever
to address it. I should own the fact that I’m confrontational, instead of
pretending like I’m not until I die of curiosity. I’m not going to lie; it
still hurts a ton when I see her around. But, I don’t wonder why anymore and
keep myself up thinking about it. I’m hoping that this post will enable me to
move on. It probably won’t change how I feel, but maybe it’ll speed the healing
processes. I’m done wondering why, and hoping that she’ll “take me back”, all
that’s left is for me to disassociate the feelings of sadness and pain with her
name.
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