I have a confession. I periodically find myself on my best friend from high school’s Instagram, silently checking in to see what she’s been up to recently. I wonder if she’s been accomplishing the things we used to dream about when we were younger, silently rooting for her from afar. Looking back, I couldn’t tell you why we stopped being friends. I know we had some rough patches, and life kinda got in the way, and I know that it wasn’t a clean break.Â
I’ve gone through a couple of breakups in life and am pretty familiar with the rules. It typically goes: breakup with each other, go no contact, and maybe shoot a “happy birthday” text to test the waters. However, there isn’t really a rulebook for when you break up with your best friend. When I go through romantic breakups I usually unfollow my ex and take their posts off of my social media, but what do you do with all the pictures of you and your best friend from over the years in all of your highlights? When do you remove the countless TikToks you made together before nights out? Do you unfollow their finsta? Or leave it there, suspended in time. When the break isn’t so clean and the love is still there, it can be really hard to know what comes next.Â
Not too long ago I was scrolling on TikTok and found a video that reminded me of a girl I used to be really close with. I clicked the share button, then her name, and hovered over the send button. I wanted to send it to her and knew it wouldn’t be a huge deal if I did, but we hadn’t talked in so long that it just felt weird, and I kept on scrolling. During a friendship breakup the boundaries are unclear, especially if you didn’t have a dramatic ending. There’s no closure text, no final goodbyes, just fizzing out. It’s hard to find closure in accepting the silence. When you wait around for someone to reach out and make plans instead of you initiating it and you realize, it’s never gonna happen. When her birthday passes and you get years ago memories celebrating it but you just aren’t close enough anymore to post a happy birthday message. When you run into each other on campus and say “we should hang out soon!” knowing neither will follow through on the plan. Its the ambiguity in ending a relationship that used to mean the world to you.Â
You’re grieving relationships that didn’t necessarily end, they just changed, often without your consent. You didn’t have some messy reason for leaving each other, or a blowout fight that made you never speak again. Sometimes people grow up and grow apart, and that’s just life. You go on about your life till someone says “Didn’t you guys used to be friends?” and get hung up on the term used to be.Â
We don’t talk anymore. We don’t send each other videos. We don’t know what’s going on in each other’s lives. Somewhere out there though, there are a couple girls who once knew every single thing about me, and inside of me there are memories with them that I’ll always cherish. Not every friendship is meant to last, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t matter. Love can change shape without disappearing, and sometimes the best option is to root for their success from afar.