“-I don’t know what to do with it –
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag
-With what?
-With all the love I have for her. I don’t know…where to – put it now.”
Fleabag sits there with Boo and asks a very simple question.
She asks where she can put all the love she has for her mother now.
I can never stop thinking about all the friends I’ve lost in my life.
My first best friend lives across the street, two houses from mine. I haven’t seen her in three years despite living in the same street. I think about her often. I don’t know what she’s doing, if she’s okay. I don’t know who she is now, and perhaps I will never get to know the person she will go on to be. But I remember what she was like, and maybe that is enough for me.
I might not know her college major, but I still remember the blue skirt she loved ever so deeply in the second grade. I remember that she loved the 6th level in hopscotch. She loved chocolate ice cream, and her favourite pasta was from a nearby café that closed down years ago. I don’t know what to do with this information now. Where do I put all the love that I never got to show her?
I wish I could go back to her house one day. I would tuck all the love I have for her into an empty drawer in her old cupboard. I would hope that she opens that drawer from time to time and leave it at that.
I always think of her on her birthday. That café closed down years ago and no one in this city even remembers its name but I do — not because I ate there, but because I know she loved it. And what do I do with this piece of information now? How do I stop myself from thinking of her every time I smell her perfume on someone else? When I first got on social media, she was the first person I searched for. I typed in every name and pet name I knew, her relatives, her school, anything that could lead me to her. But nothing came up.
I am nineteen. I still think of her. I still remember every detail, her face, her smile, her straight hair. I remember everything, I try not to look at the few childhood photos we have together, but sometimes, I just wish that I could still talk to her, I wish that I could be her best friend again. I miss us being little girls who used to play together everyday. I miss laughing with her. She had a habit of making up gibberish words when she did not know how to communicate something. I have tried so hard to understand what I feel when I think of her. I sit at my desk, writing furiously, trying to capture what it feels like, but no words come close. I wish I could tell her this, I am sure she would have the perfect word for me.
Please don’t ever become a stranger
New Year’s Day, Taylor Swift
Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere
Her presence will always linger. I will carry that house in my street in the back of my mind forever. Maybe I can take shelter in her house when mine feels too far away. Maybe I can exist in those memories when I no longer recognise myself.
Whenever I think about what has become of our friendship, I feel like I cannot breathe. Everything I want to say to her rises up like one of her gibberish words in my throat and gets stuck there and I quietly swallow it back down. And it’s not just her. I think about my other friends too — elementary and middle school ones. Sometimes I used to lie about the nicknames my friends called me, too embarrassed to admit them. Sometimes I fantasised about starting fights just to get away from them. And still, I would go back. I hated myself for loving them, but the loneliness of sitting alone was heavier.
I hate to admit this, but I think of them even now. I should hate myself for it. After everything, I should. But the truth is: just because it ended badly, or slowly rotted into something poisonous, doesn’t mean the love disappeared. Maybe all the love I never gave them still sits inside me with nowhere to go. Maybe that’s why my heart feels too heavy sometimes, because it’s carrying love that never had a place to rest, love that wasn’t supposed to stay in my heart for so long.
“Don’t make me hate you. Loving you is painful enough.”
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag
I think love and hatred can coexist. They’re not opposites. You cannot truly hate someone you haven’t loved. Maybe hate is just love that has curdled.
All the memories I have of my friends are blurry — not because I don’t revisit them, but because I’m the only one who does. As the years go by, a clear sheen of frost forms over them. They’re still there, visible but untouchable. I cannot get rid of them, and I cannot bring them back. They just linger, like ghosts of a past I can never hold again.
Sometimes when I lie awake at night, I feel them close, like I could almost touch their hands before they slip away, carried off with the wind.
You’re my best friend
The Frost, Mitski
Now I’ve no one to tell
How I lost my best friend
Mitski calls it The Frost. The ache of losing a best friend and having no one to tell. About the frost that covers everything. The silence between what was and what can never return. That is what it feels like to miss someone I won’t ever talk to. To love people I will never see again. To look at my past as if it’s encased in glass, a thin frost between my hands and theirs.
When I think about Fleabag asking where she should put her love, I think: maybe this is my answer too. Maybe all the love I have for my lost friends, all the things I never said, live here. In the frost. In the untouchable, unchangeable distance between what was and what can never be again.
I miss my best friend.
I love her.
I won’t call.
Some stories stay with us, just like some people do. Find more such stories at Her Campus at MUJ.