You have brown eyes. The longest lashes I have ever seen. Those eyes. When you laugh, they sparkle like the sky outside, a smattering of sequins against miles of deep silk fabrics. When you cry, head against my shoulder, they hold the deepest pain imaginable and the kind of pain you can’t even imagine. Now, the only kind of eyes I see when you catch my eye in the cold linoleum based halls is a look of complete repulsion and disgust. When you laugh, it’s the most joyful sound you have ever heard. The peels of giggles encircle us in the flashlight beam of your Blackberry at 3am in your basement, creating a cocoon of mutual contentment. They say I’m grieving. They tell me that when you lose someone you love, you feel empty. I feel like you blinded me and took away all my senses along with my friends. In the words of Taylor Swift, “It was enchanting to meet you.” But now, the games of hide and seek in the basement, inside jokes and tearful calls that last two hours are gone. In their place are lingering gazes from lockers that end in a glare and a flurry of whispers and snickers, fierce texts that make you confront everything you ever knew about her and yourself and lonely Saturday nights in front of the television. “It was enchanting to meet you.” You, with your beautiful face and body to match, bold comebacks and crazy nights. You, the one who never turned down a dare and loved parties. You brought out myself, my actual personality that was buried under the quest of finding myself. But then she came along. And that girl was beautiful with her perfect eye makeup, skinny body, popular boyfriend, flat-ironed locks, and airhead personality. “It was enchanting to meet you.” She took you in her manicured claws, yanked you out of your own body and enticed you with her air of rich neighborhood blasé and a personality that would allow you to boss her around as much as you wanted to. No matter how much I begged you, pleading, on my knees to remember us. The time your mom drove us home from a parade and we hung our bare feet out the window, when you wanted you practice the smoky eye and I let you try on my and you got distracted in the middle of it and we wandered off, forgetting our half done makeup. When we wanted to see if when we danced, we looked stupid, so we put on fancy clothes for nothing, did our hair and makeup and danced in front of the mirror alone to Ceelo’s “F*** You” and Rihanna’s “S&M” for a half hour. When we spent an hour of my birthday dinner begging your mom to let you sleep over that night before my party. She refused, and we had to be pulled away from each other until the next morning on Saturday at 7am, when I begged my mom to drive over and get you in our pajamas. She did of course. Us, giggling and telling strangers in New York City and Vermont that we were sisters. Us, wandering around the mall, arms laden with shopping bags full of stuff we didn’t need, pretending we were British and talking loudly in gibberish. I wish it hadn’t come to this. I wish it was you and me. Me and you. Just us, two loud, giggling middle school girls taking on this big, bad worlds, not alone because we had each other. I want you back. Please come back. But bring your old self back. For now, I will be here waiting. Because the best moments were the ones when I was with you. Making fools out of ourselves, dreaming of college, getting jittery before parties. Throwing popcorn at the movie screen. Dreaming of the families we will raise but still be best friends. Please. If you read this, you would come back. I just want you to dig into your glazed over heart and dig out the memories. Because I love you. And I thought you loved me.


It was enchanting to meet you.