When Your Best Friend Becomes Your Ex-Best Friend

Sometimes I can see how toxic our friendship may have been.

To be honest, perhaps I built it up to be more than it really was; maybe, at the time, I was just a little blind. Because the way I see it, or at least the way I felt at the time, you were practically a sister—a best friend, someone I relied on and trusted with, for what it’s worth, nearly anything. And after all, I think that’s the point of a best friend: despite all the bullshit, or despite what might go down, you love each other too much to really let it all crumble and fail. Despite the circumstances, you make it work. You find a way to fix things.

And so maybe that was our downfall. Perhaps that’s where we went wrong, or at least that’s the tidbit I overlooked back when we were still friends. You didn’t necessarily find our friendship worth fixing. It didn’t meet whatever criteria might have made it salvageable. And so it deteriorated. Slowly at first, but then suddenly at a substantial rate: what could have been a few days of not talking eventually turned to weeks, then to months. We ignored each other as if we’d been strangers all along, as if we weren’t once inseparable, as if those two girls weren’t ever us.

Above all else, the truth is that we were weak. Perhaps it was a two-way street, or perhaps it was just you. Though either way, you bailed as soon as things got tough. You found a way to push me out and cast me aside like nothing; because why bother, right?

And that was about the point where, instead of further looking to mend things, instead of trying to deflect your looks and figure out why things had happened the way they did, I instead began to resent you. I was angry. In addition, I was confused and bitter and, perhaps above all else, I was genuinely hurt.

Because I don’t really care how critical these years are supposed to be. They say that in college, in your twenties, you find your real friends. You weed out anyone who treats you badly and prioritize those who don’t. This is supposed to be the time that we all mature and see the realness in one another. So perhaps that’s where the bitterness comes from. I prioritized you. I thought you were one of the good ones, the sort of friendship that would stick around forever, long past our college years. I’m upset not only at you, but also at myself for thinking so naively.

And perhaps, in light of that fact, I should be able to move past whatever sort of friendship we had together, good or bad. The fact of the matter is, it’s a ‘had.’ Past tense. Gone. Despite how much I may want to relish in all of our stupid college memories—downing a cheap bottle of wine on a Wednesday night, raiding each other’s closets for a night out, or even just all the inside jokes I still make in my head every once and a while—that would be holding on to something that seems long gone.

And don’t get me wrong; we had a great friendship. Thought the fact of the matter is that some people aren’t necessarily meant to be friends. Apparently, just as it seems you’ve long ago accepted, we were two of the ones who weren’t. And so this, if anything, may be that acceptance on my end. This is closure, in a way, or at least a way to acknowledge that things are different now.

This is me—just as you’ve already done—cutting you out of my life.