I am writing after a very long time but I don’t bring good tidings. The past few months have been horrible physically, emotionally and mentally. I lost a lot of things on the way (wish some of it would have been fat). How do I put the turmoil in a more dramatic way?! I lost the person I used to call my best friend. Let me give you a bit of background on the subject of best-friend as per my experience and perspective. I was never lucky when it came to having someone close enough whom I could call a best friend. The first person that I called my best friend sadly passed away one Sunday afternoon after she hit her head on a stone while twirling around in her garden. After that started a series of failed friendships because somehow I really had the knack to befriend selfish and self-centred people who did not know what friendship meant. There were betrayals, impolite and ill-mannered words which would always pierce my heart. I didn’t know that these things existed in friendship where you cannot give all of yourself in a relationship and love your friend through and through. But I did find out that at the end of the day you have to keep yourself protected and safe even from people who call you their bestfriend.
I think, by 9th standard, I had completely given up on the whole best friend notion. Even during high school, I always had some or other skirmishes with a close friend of mine whom everyone thought was my best friend. Now that I think about it, I guess, I am not good at managing myself when I am in a fight. When I get into an argument or have a fight with someone the relationship ends for me then and there. It is as if the thread is broken and even if you want to put it back together, there will always be a knot in between, like remembrance of what had happened. It won’t be the same as before. This is one thing I need to overcome because arguments, disagreements and fights will happen, but that shouldn’t affect the relationship with someone. But if it does get affected then that wasn’t a strong relationship in the first place.
Now, coming back again to the main topic, I refused to call anyone my best friend up until I was in my second year of undergraduate. At this point in time, I developed a strong bond with a friend, who was also my classmate back in school, over a guy she liked and another guy who liked me. Both the gentlemen were a source of constant drama in our lives. We would talk for hours about things that they did which made us happy, sad and crazy. For over two years i called her my closest friend but she called me her best friend. And eventually, I started trusting her. Then came a time when I called her my best friend because I knew she loved me for all I was. She would randomly show up at my home and we would go out to our spot and discuss in detail what our respective drama kings have been doing to make our lives miserable. Slowly, I started to open up again, feeling safe in her company, knowing that she wouldn’t hurt me because she was one of the most mature people I have met so far. She understood me, gave me my space and genuinely cared for me.
For years things were good and we knew we would be in each other’s life forever, because that is what best friend meant, right? But it was not so. I had always wondered how long would we be able to maintain our friendship, how long we can keep going without any fallouts. What I knew was one fight would be enough to crumble us down and so came our downfall after more than a decade’s old friendship. The irony of the situation was, what brought us together made us fall apart as well. The guy in my life who was always a hot topic between us, his toxicity ballooned up to the point where it reached her as well. Sad part is, even for my sake he couldn’t control his ill temper when he was talking to her. What had happened was I was staying over at her place for the night. This was my first ever night stay at a friend’s place. We were having a good time, clicking pictures, making reels with her and her family, talking all crazy things and what not. It was late at night and he called, angry and bothered that I didnt talk to him the entire day. I dont remember the exact reason but soon he asked me to give the phone to my friend. I was the biggest dummy and idiot in the whole world to have given it to her. She was fine with talking to him because who would expect that he would have talked to her in this horrendeous way which brought the first crack in our friendship. I couldnt believe that he would disregard how I would feel if he were super rude to one of the closest person in my life. My friend and I cried that night. In that heavy situation she told me things she had hid from me for years because she thought that if I were to know then I would definitely leave her. But I would never want her to think that whatever she did would ever make me abandon her. So for the next couple of years I did everything to make her believe that she can tell me anything and everything because after all she was my bestfriend. I did it so well that one of her friend commented that after she had told me everything, our friendship has become stronger. That is what I wanted and that is what happened. But meanwhile, I did not stop talking to the guy though the last straw attaching me to him was finally broken. I could never forgive him for what he had done but I knew it still wasn’t the time to leave him. She had expected that I would cut him off completely from my life after what he had done, but I didn’t. Then came the fateful day, when she found out that I still talk to him. It was my birthday.
Rea1405 