This time, when you leave, you don’t hug me. Instead, youmutter a simple “Bye, Alice” and start walking away. Iwatch your back as you leave, tears stinging my eyes as I s-ilently will you to turn around, to hug me, to show even the slightest indication that you still care. That I even matter at all. You don’t turn around. I furiously rub my eyes, the tightness in my chest building and sharpening to a dull ache. I can feel the tears gathering in the corner of my vision, the sobs clawing their way up my throat.
“Fuck,” I whisper, shaking my hands violently as if to redirect my misery towards my fingertips and banish it to the summer air. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, not here…” I’ve already spent so many hours crying today. I can’t afford any more tears―especially not while you’re still only a hundred feet away from me.
I’m finally turning away from your vanishing silhouette when someone slams into me, almost knocking me to the ground. As I stumble backwards, they rush up the steps and run in your direction. I wonder if they know you. Do they get to be your friend now, even as I have to say goodbye to our friendship?
It seems like you’re friends with everyone besides me now. All of your dorm friends, all of the running club people, even the rest of your friends from high school…they are the ones you care about. They are the people you still want in your life.
They are the people you hug when you say goodbye. Not me.
I miss being your friend. I miss the simple things: our across- the-room glances and eyebrow raises, our daily leg hangs and hurdle drills, our secret handshake that you’ve probably forgotten by now. I miss screaming and laughing in the rain with you, I miss listening to music with you, I miss talking to you every day about stupid, inconsequential things and things that are so important we don’t even know what to say.
I miss the not-so-simple things too, like how you would listen to me rant about my problems for hours, trying to make me feel better if only by providing an accepting silence. I miss how you never made me feel like I was too much for you, even as the rest of the world screamed that my very existence was excessive. I miss your quiet, constant support on the days when just surviving was painful, and the way that your presence was something I could always rely on, something that could always make me feel a little less broken.
The person who ran into me suddenly turns around, as if just noticing they almost bulldozed someone to the ground.
“Sorry about that! Are you okay?” they call out, not bothering to wait for a response before turning around and resuming their run in the opposite direction.
“I’m fine,” I mutter. Fine, not okay: a distinction that no one will ever understand anymore, now that you don’t care enough to notice. Because you don’t notice, at least not recently. Not since you left.
I watch the ground as I walk home, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk and kicking any loose pebbles into the street to distract myself from the thoughts weighing down on me. They churn inside my brain, declaring me an idiot for assuming that that one and a half miles wouldn’t keep us from being friends this year. I always thought that we’d still hang out after you left, but apparently, when you don’t want someone in your life anymore, one and a half miles is a really fucking long distance.
My thoughts scold me for my naivety in believing all the empty words you spewed last year. If I could go back in time and erase when you told me that we’d hang out after you left, I would. Because the pain of knowing that you did want us to stay friends only a couple months ago, but now barely feel anything more than apathy towards me, is agonizing. With you, I’m not even getting to go from close friend to acquaintance; instead, you’re becoming a stranger overnight, and I can’t do anything to stop it.
Nothing will ever be the same, I realize suddenly. We’ll never again share across-the-room glances and eyebrow raises, or hang our legs together after doing hurdle drills, or scream and laugh in the rain. We’ll never be as close as we once were, no matter how much I want us to be. Unfortunately, friendship really only works if both people make an effort, and right now, you aren’t.
As I trudge home, my shoes like lead weights on my feet, I look around at this world you now inhabit: new and exciting, filled with so many different people and opportunities…of course you would want to leave your old life behind. I don’t resent this fact; I’m happy that you’re meeting new people and creating a better life for yourself. I just wish that this new life could include me too. I can feel you abandoning me: it’s a massive hole opening up in my life, in all the places that used to contain you by definition. Places that now feel so empty and lifeless, so unrecognizable in the face of your absence.
I’m close to tears again, I realize, as pain slices up my throat and needles prick the corners of my eyes. I’m only a quarter mile from my house, but I need to be home now, where no one will be able to see me cry. I start to run, letting my legs propel me downhill. I revel in the wind whipping my face and the feeling of freedom as I open up my stride and sprint away from the pain of being left behind. It feels good, but I know that it’s only a temporary relief from the misery that trails me like a shadow.
There’s no way for you to possibly understand the special type of agony I’m in, because you’re not being forgotten and discarded: I am. You’ve moved on to new things, to better things, but I’m still where I’ve always been. My life is exactly the same, and this monotony and predictability emphasizes your absence that much more. And you―you probably don’t even miss me. Why would you, if your new life never included me to begin with? You can’t miss someone who never belonged in the first place.
My feet pound on the sidewalk as I sprint down the hill towards my house, but I’m too slow; the tears have already begun. The first sob hits my body and I silently crumple to the ground, shaking with the force of my grief. A numb, cold despair settles over me, seeping outward from my chest to clot in my bloodstream and pool in my fingertips. I desperately wrap my arms around myself―to stop the numbness or ease the cold, I’m not sure―but all it manages to do is remind me of my solitude.
My mom says that the end of some friendships is a good thing. She says that people come and go in our lives, and that sometimes we aren’t meant to hold onto a friendship forever. But even as I cry in the middle of the sidewalk with my knees hugged close to my chest, alone and unloved, I can’t bring myself to agree with her. After all, not too long ago you were someone who loved me completely and unconditionally, and I refuse to give up on believing that you might again in the future. So I will continue to
cry every day, curled up in the middle of the sidewalk like I am right now, for even a sliver of our friendship to return.
I won’t give up on us, even if you do.