Remember when we used to race to the playground? Remember when we’d spend hours walking around the field, just talking? Remember when we used to meet up in the bathrooms when the teachers separated us? Do you remember abandoning me, tearing my heart to tiny pieces, scattering the shards among the dust and things that rot?

I never wanted us to come to this. We were best friends, closer than close. We were practically joined at the hip. I loved you so much and you loved me the same. We’d spend hours together, swapping secrets and telling jokes. You taught me modesty and how to do a cartwheel; I taught you patience and all the swear words I knew.
But I guess middle school changed you. You found cooler people than your dorky best friend. You had swim practice every day, so you were too busy for the calls and texts that used to consume hours of our lives. I guess I just faded away into the background of your busy, changing life.

I was never as important to you as you were to me. You had tons of other friends, and even if you didn’t you could make friends so easily. You are so funny and smart and you just light up a room. There is a grace to you that I could never have. You were my only friend. I am socially awkward. I sneak into a room and find my home in the corner. You were my only light in my world of shadow. I was one of the many lights in yours. But I don’t blame you. There’s nothing a person can do about how they are born.

But even as your light fades into the jaws of darkness, I try to strike a match of shadow to make my own flame of hope. I must carve my own path; I will forge my own destiny. And while that means I must abandon the friend that was my wings, my other self, my whole world, the other half of my heart, I know, at the end of the path, I will be alright.

I cried as I changed the home screen of my phone from a picture of the two of us together, as I removed your letters from my walls. I cried as my polaroid photos of us got tucked into a folder on my desk, as my heart that was yours shattered like glass. I cried as I removed the ‘best’ from ‘best friend’.
But I don’t cry now as I sit watching the stars we once watched together; feeling my broken heart heal as I sit here alone.

Goodbye, friend. Goodbye.