Best Friends (forever?)

How do two people become best friends?

Its usually something innocent, something true and raw.

How two best friends lose each other?

That’s a little more complicated than innocence.

Initially, they promise each other that they’ll never be replace each other. They try hard to keep that promise, they do. But circumstance proves that this promise is harder to keep than they thought.

Yet, they try. For years they remain best friends. When you would ask any one of them who their best friend is, the other would be their instant response. Deep talks and honesty. Protecting each other and being each other’s shoulder to cry on. People would say they were impossible to separate.

But one day, all of a sudden they would grow distant. The same connection would not be there. The same ease with which they talked about anything and everything would disappear. Others would notice and shake their heads.

“They were best friends? What happened?”

They would wonder the same thing.

Now, they would constantly try to find their way back to each other, but as I’ve mentioned before, its complicated. Temporarily it would work, but that spark, that truth and those conversations would never return.

Mostly because they might have found somebody else’s shoulder to cry on. They might have replaced their best friend.

But friends they would always remain. Just mundane friends, nothing special. They’ll look at each other and their hearts would ache for their best friend, but there’s no going back and they both know it. They’ve lost each other.

Every time they look at their friend with their new best friend, it feels like the knife embedded in their heart goes further in. Every time they try to take it out, it’s to no avail. Their hands come out bloody and slippery and the knife stays there.

Yet, they know that the other will always be there for them. They were best friends, a relationship that can never fully tarnish. They would go to each other in times of trouble.

One of the old best friends has a fight with their new found best friend, and goes crying to her old, real best friend, because it only feels natural.

They talk, deep and meaningfully, for the first time in years. One tells the other to go apologize to her new best friend, because she deserves it.

“It hurts to lose your best friend, believe me.” She warns.
“I know it does. I’ve already lost one.” She says in between tears, trying to convey an apology to her original best friend, begging for things to become normal.
She smiles at her, though her heart aches to say the next words, “So try extra hard not to lose this one.”

How do best friends lose each other?

It’s complicated, because they never truly lose each other. They just find someone better, and a true best friend will accept that.

~Going back to my perfect reverie because my tests are over(!!)