Always and Forever...for a while.

 I don’t believe in best friends anymore.

It never struck me until one day in college, someone called me theirs, and I just couldn’t bring myself to say it back. Something had fundamentally shifted in my perspective on friendship. Friends are like leaves, I think—each friendship grows in different seasons of your life, but fall always descends with bittersweet farewells; yellowing, fading away, leaving you bare for the winter. Some leaves stay longer, but not forever. I stopped believing in that when my first ‘best friend’ left my life—forever.

Saying that term doesn’t really do justice to the bond shared between two teenage girls growing up together. There’s this sort of exhilaration surrounding every small moment, this heady excitement just from being together. It’s the feeling that anything horrible could happen, but it’s less horrible with you. We were the pair of the class, our names were always said together and they fit perfectly, like a rhyme. Looking back, I wouldn’t admit it, but I really did love her like a sister. We fought like sisters, too, but with the nostalgic high of adolescence comes the hefty price of immaturity. We were proud. Arrogant. Jealous. Competitive. And ultimately, not even our sacred bond could save us from ourselves.

I decided to let her go in high school. My grades were terrible, we fought all the time, and I was miserable. I didn’t have any other friends, and now when I think about the way that I behaved, not even I can justify it, because I was cruel. I stopped talking to her, and there was such a fundamental shift in energy that even the teachers noticed. It was so unnecessarily dramatic, and the rest of high school was what I remember as the worst years of my life—they must be.

I was alone all the time. I watched her laughing with new friends. I stopped smiling as much. I drowned myself in work. I found a few other people to sit with in breaks but most of the time I used to find myself a corner in an empty classroom and huddle myself away, reading a book or just looking out of the window at groups of other girls giggling and eating. Despite having a decent number of friends in college, I don’t think that feeling ever goes away—I’m always going to be the girl who sits alone during break time.

Towards the end of the year, at our farewell party, we caught each other’s eye and we hugged. I didn’t feel much, to be very honest. I thought I was being the bigger person, after we hadn’t spoken to each other the whole time. During our final exam, I remember catching her eye, and we smiled at each other. I felt something, then. Something very much akin to the hysteric hushed laughter at midnight and pages of words on birthdays and bracelets with broken hearts, with the echoed whisper of forever. I don’t remember how my exam went. But I remember that.

I was on vacation in Dubai when the call came. She had an accident. She was in a coma. Part of her brain was dead.

Forever.

She was in a coma for 9 months before passing away in early 2025. She would have been 18, on the 5^th of this August. And I haven’t recovered from that. It’s been easier to think of her, but I can’t read her letters without it hurting somewhere deep inside. And I didn’t know whether I deserved to grieve—we weren’t even friends anymore—but I couldn’t erase the memories, no matter how hard I tried. Love digs her claws deep and leaves scars. And those stay with you, perhaps forever.

Maybe that’s why I can’t use the term ‘best friend’ now. But I do have close friends. Friends who have keys to different doors of my heart. Friends I laugh with, friends I tell my worries to. I don’t know if I’ve known them long enough to love them, but I love myself when I’m around them, and I think right now, that’s what’s important to me. I love how I laugh with reckless abandon, how I feel that sense of togetherness again. Of not being alone. And maybe one day I will be again. Maybe I know deep down that it’s temporary. But isn’t everything? We all have that little voice that tries to warn us, but I’d rather have loved and lost than never have loved at all. The branches don’t stay bare because they know the leaves will fall again—they flourish despite it. We all have to live our seasons, even the bitingly cold ones; and through it, we’ll learn how to keep ourselves warm, while knowing that summer is just around the corner.

 

~P.L.P.