It is an undeniable truth that breaking up is hard to do. It is never really ended and someone, whether they admit it or not, will always get hurt. Places that were once sacred are now forbidden. Songs that were sung together now make your ears bleed and pictures of happier times are shredded up into tiny pieces and thrown away. What is the worst part you might ask? It is when you are breaking up with your best friend.
Break ups extend far beyond the boyfriend and girlfriend dynamic. When you break up with a best friend, you are letting go of a part of who you are. Normally, our best friends enrich our lives and help to shape us into the person we have become. When you break up with a best friend, it feels like you are left with a void that can’t be repaired by a casual drunken one-night stand like it sometime can with a boyfriend break up; the hurt is much deeper.
I recently went through the trauma of a best friend break up. She was someone who I thought would be a part of my life until the day I died. We grew up together, laughed and cried together, she was truly my other half. She was the peanut butter to my jelly, the Tom to my Jerry and the Romy to my Michelle. Losing her was like losing a limb and now I have to figure out how to function without her.
What causes a best friend break up? For me, life just happened. We grew apart into different worlds and became different people. The reasons we were so close were not valid anymore and the foundation that we built ourselves on cracked. Instead of celebrating each other’s successes, there was bitterness and jealousy. Instead of years filled with nonstop laughter, like there once was, there is silence. We could no longer finish each other’s sentences but instead spoke different languages.
So what is next for us? Is a best friend break up repairable? We were always the type of friends who could go months without talking but then pick up one day as if a moment hadn’t passed between us.
Now we have no words for each other. We have become strangers in each other’s lives. Perhaps someday that will change, as it stands right now though, I could see her in the street and neither of us would have the courage to say hello.
That shatters me.
Breaking up is hard to do. When it is your best friend, you can’t run to them and tell them about it like you would a regular relationship fight. You can’t over-analyze the context of each conversation together. You can’t vent about how irrational the other is being. The only thing you can do is learn to live without the limb and move on. In friendship like in love, if it is meant to be, it will find a way.
In the meantime, thank you for being a friend.
