I find it weird turning 21. I still feel like a kid even though I graduated college, am working a full-time job, and am waiting on grad school decisions. I never wondered about what my friendships would look like at this age, but I’m content with where they’re at. I feel like my 15-year-old self would feel otherwise, though. I say that because I don’t have a massive friend group that goes out every other night. Instead, I FaceTime my best friend from my hometown almost every day and text two other people. She and I met when I was a freshman and she was a sophomore, but we weren’t friends until the following year. From that point forward, we went through a series of friend groups and when the friend group fell apart, we always stuck together.
Even though we were best friends, we had other friends that were close to us individually. A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about all the different types of friends that we have in our lives. Family friends, best friends, teammates, friends that you talked to in your classes but never hung out with outside of class, etc. I realized that friendships, meeting people that you somehow click with, is one of the purest forms of love to experience, but it is also one of the most hurtful things to lose.
“The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
– Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein, Chapter 24
When I was in the 7th grade, I was friends with three other people, two girls, and one boy. I was pretty close with all of them, but my friendship with the boy felt different. If you’re assuming I meant romantically, I’m meaning the complete opposite. We were both on the same page regarding our friendship, and the thought of any type of romantic feeling was non-existent. To this day, it was the most platonic friendship I had ever had with a guy. We stopped being friends over something dumb — I think it was because he started hanging out with different people. I never hated him for that, it just made me sad. It felt nice knowing a guy wanted to be around you, not because he was romantically interested in you or just found you attractive, but because he genuinely wanted to befriend you in the most platonic way possible. I feel that is the purest form of unadulterated love. There was nothing to hide, nothing to lie about, at 13/14 years old, and we decided that being friends at that point in time made sense to us.
I hope he’s doing well.
“Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
-Hanya Yanagihara
A Little Life, Pg. 134
Fast forward to the last two years of high school, when my friendships turned sour. I had a larger friend group, but an even smaller and closer one within that friend group. It started out well, but I think I chose to ignore certain red flags from the beginning. However, I stuck it out for two years. Those two years were the best and the worst years of friendship that I had ever experienced. I’d cry every other night because of a small comment my ex made that sounded off (yes, my ex and I stayed close friends too soon after breaking up twice; if you’re wondering how that dynamic turned out, let’s just say it didn’t work out). There were nights during the beginning of COVID when my group of friends would all sneak out to see each other and hang out until the sun rose. We’d FaceTime throughout the whole day, playing guitar together and random online games, watching movies, and most days we didn’t even talk, we just enjoyed being on the phone with one another.
I think there was a lot of love there, but we were all wounded people who didn’t know how to communicate what type of love we needed from one another. Our friendship was not perfect, it was unhealthy and co-dependent, but we couldn’t just let each other go. Things needed to end badly in order for everything to truly break off. It hurt; I didn’t realize how lonely the following weeks felt even when I was surrounded by other people. Our friendship started to grow into a place of fear rather than love. Everybody knew it, but no one wanted to say anything.
Here we are, two years later, and I have not spoken to any of the people I have mentioned besides my other best friend. These people know so much about me, yet so little at the same time. How beautiful is it to experience so much love and loss all at once?
I hope they’re healing because I know that I did. Even after all these years, I hope they’re okay.