A friendship lost still hurts … many years after

“All through my preteen and teenage years, I had one best friend whom I shared everything with. I was a bit on the shy and quiet side so I relied on her lively ways to spice up my life. In many ways, we were opposites – my family was conservative while hers were very modern and flexible; I was shy but she was very bold; I didn’t know how to talk to boys so barely had any male friends but she had many male friends and knew how to be around them. I held my best friend in high esteem because she was everything I wanted to be.

When the results of our high school finals came out, she made A’s in all her subjects while I had A’s in just half of mine – so even in academics, she was on top. It was the same with the results of our university entrance exams because her score was ahead of mine with over twenty points. I was going to be an art student and she was going to study one of the medical courses – it was an exciting time as we discussed how amazing it would be to be college students. If only I knew what was ahead.

We had picked different schools and I left for my school before her. It was before the advent of cellphones in the hands of everyone so we could not communicate while apart. After the first semester break, I was excited to get home and see her so we could exchange stories of how our first semester went.

My school was about nine hours away by bus which was what I took. Once I got home, I dropped my bags and rushed over to my best friend’s house. She was not home but her sister asked me to wait. Her sister also gave me the bad news that my friend did not go off to school like I thought because there’d been allegations of exam malpractice in her exam center which nullified most of the results from that center including hers. I was upset to hear this, knowing all the plans we’d made and the conversations we’d had.

When my best friend got home, she barely looked at me or spoke to me. I sat there, uncertain of how to deal with her silence. When her older sisters noticed her coldness towards me, they started chatting with me. I stayed about an hour and when she continued to ignore me, I left. It happened the same way the next day and days after that. I tried to get her to talk to me but she would not. Eventually, I told my sister what was going on and she asked me to stop going to my friend’s house and reluctantly, I did.

We were so close so we shared many friends and this made it awkward to hang out with my friends because they were her friends and many of them were actually closer to her because of her extrovert nature. At church or social events, we would meet and she would ignore me; if I went to say hi to someone she was with, she would move away. We’d been like twins so everyone noticed our separation and kept asking what caused our rift but I didn’t have an answer to give. Even my mum kept asking me what was wrong and didn’t believe when I said I didn’t know. I’m sure she thought we’d fought over a boy or something but it was nothing like that. Just like that, my best friend stopped talking to me.

This is about nineteen years since that time and we still don’t talk. I’ve seen her a few times from a distance and once, we met up close and she managed to say hi – it was so distant, you’d never believe we’d been best friends once. I looked at her and wondered how she could treat me the way she had all those years ago.  All I could think of was that I had committed the crime of beating her at something – I’d entered college before her – and she didn’t like it. She was always ahead and I’d always rejoiced in her success but when it was my turn (through no fault of mine), she picked the option of hating me and I didn’t understand how she could be that way.

So, that is the story of how I lost my best friend. The truly annoying part is that it still hurts me when I think of her; maybe because she was someone I liked and admired so much or her hateful attitude rubbished the many moments we’d spent together - laughing at stuff or sharing secrets, or it might be because she was my only real friend and one of the few I always felt would be in my corner. It just still hurts.