the sour after taste of maintaining true friendship

Should i send this so said friend, or swallow my words instead? How does friendship start so quickly only to start fading away? How does one maintain genuine friendships outside of school?

What do I do when my stomach drops after we hang up the call. Why can i feel my tears form, i thought this was a good call. This is supposed to be a happy tick on each others’ to do list: call friend and catch up. But sometimes it feels like old friends only reach out when nobody around them can give them what they crave. When, in a rare instance, no one around them suits their taste buds. A momentary glitch. They want someone who understands their past and not their brilliant present self. That’s when they start to reply to your 3 week old texts. You’re their emotional back up pool. Their savings account when they run out of funds. They say they miss you, but do they love you the same? Sometimes they call out of guilt, you cannot tell if they really miss you as much as they say. You’re hurt, you’re hurt that you’re not their number 1 or 3 anymore. You’re something else. Somewhere stuck in the back of their mind. Just outside of their peripheral vision. When they see that new interesting thing, do they think of texting you a pic? Or have you slipped so far behind what’s important to them?

What happens then? Are we still best friends?

you didn’t like getting dirty sand in your shoes, but i made you to sit with me by the ocean anyway

Our calls are plagued with awkward silences, we play the catch up game. But you don’t know me anymore. I still speak the same, match the rhythm we always played. We pretend it’s all the same but you don’t know what my favorite snack tastes like, or how i started wearing my eyeliner. I never see you cry, i just get left on read for 9 days because you were going through tough times. I don’t mind giving you the space, but it starts to feel less like friendship and more like a symphony of after shock waves. Always stuck in the aftermath. The wreckage after the storm. The little things that are left out of place, even after they cleaned the breakage.

I am stuck in the result. The conclusion. The coherent well organized thoughts you spill into your voice note.

But i am hungry for the raw you, the unfiltered. I miss finding you in the hallway, crying in front of the locker. Stalking your tumblr to figure out what’s wrong. Hold you by my side as we skip class and talk about life. I miss hanging out by the beach and making fun of old guys. I miss how you cried when i said goodbye. I don’t want to hear the diluted story about how bad your exam was. How you fell to the ground and people had to get you water. I want to be their to hold you to my heart, to hand you the water myself. I want to hug you while you sob because i don’t know what to do anymore. I want you to drive me around in your car. I don’t want the watered down version of you. The one you carefully construct, stitching in pieces of the past you to make sure I will still like the new version of yourself.

you barely cry, you said you keep a tracker. i cry all the time, does that make a friendship meant to be?

When we became friends, i made a vow: To be your friend and to support you in everything. But there’s nothing for me to try and support, I now get the news after it occurs. We have found our own new timeline, somewhere hovering above the real fold of time. Complex feelings intertwined with afterthoughts. Our lives do not occur in the present anymore. You used to ask if I can come to your house ASAP, you’re home alone and scared of your own thoughts. Now, you only text when you have any spare time, after you’ve hung out with every friend and went on plenty of dates. After you’ve watched all the good movies with them. I don’t want the movie recommendation, saying you watched it with Ray and really freaking liked it. I want to fall on the ground, breath catching, chest panging, wrapped in your purple blanket, laughing out loud about the Mukbang we are watching.

we watched this amazing movie together. spoiler: we laughed at the idea of seeing clones of ourselves. we’d never take our own selves seriously…

Is it bad of me to be envious of all your new friends? Is it terrible of me to be mad at you for not loving me the same way you love them? Maybe it’s all in my head, but I used to be your everything. We used to talk about our future apartment in Europe, but now you talk about it with your new friend. You call her your everything.

Our friendship was meant to be, even our siblings were the same age. Even the mundane felt okay. We walked around supermarkets for hours, sat on your bedroom floor eating. We tried to learn how to sing together, and never stopped laughing. We never studied on our “study dates”. No wonder i got a shit grade. Instead, you listed out your darkest secrets, but now you whisper it to somebody else. You always had that special way of making deep connections with everyone you met, but here i am grasping at another friendship like this. You always asked hard questions, making eye contact without breaking. It made me uneasy, but you broke the shell I carefully curated. The image i fooled everyone into believing through my notion templates and home screen It Girl wallpapers. The shy, got-it-together girl image was fractured under your inquisitive gaze. We were supposed to experience life together, to hold our hands tight as we go through thick and thin. Go on cafe dats, read books, and analyze the effects of the patriarchy; you were always a strong-minded feminist. But here we are growing up in different countries, no cafe dates or movie nights. Not even ones hosted online. But i don’t want you to become a fragment of my teenager self. A snippet of what it meant to be young. Yet, i write all this after one of our few phone calls ended. I don’t know why this one was different, it felt like a thousand stars fell on my head, waking me up from the dark reality I have been ignoring. Looking the other way, pretending we were still the same. I must’ve said the wrong thing, but why did the awkwardness stretch like this? Our next phone call is what? a month away? It’s okay, we will both forget this by then, so what does it matter to address things? The final question is, what am i supposed to say when you tell me about your new friends? You analyze movies with them, while I try to make sense of this new plot-twist where our paths don’t cross. A plot that does not end with us living in the European we wanted to so carefully design . A movie with a scary, sad ending. I just hope there is still time to change this before the closing credits roll in.

hey friend mentioned in the post, in case you found this, lmk and text me about it <3