Notes From The Smoking Area

Around 6 years ago my best friend and I- we broke up.

I say we broke up, I think we both kept calling each other our best friend despite the relationship slowly fizzling out over months.

I have been broken up with a few times, but nothing hurt more than losing my best friend.

She was the one who had seen me through all those horrible relationships, through exams, through starting uni- at one point I would say we were fairly inseparable.

There was never an absence of tension, there were certainly things that looking back I can see were slowly eroding the trust we had for one another.

It is strange, we were friends for maybe 13 years and the entire friendship broke down in the space of 4 messages- we haven’t spoken since.

I would’ve said at the time that she was fucking mental, that I had done nothing wrong, that I was the victim in all of this.

But she was hurting.

She was in pain and I was where the pain could be anchored.

I was everything she was not and she was everything I wasn’t.

She was sensible and I was reckless.

I was confident and she was shy.

She kept her circle small and I would’ve invited anyone into the fold.

I don’t think I appreciated at the time how much my moving to Edinburgh hurt her.

If it was the other way about, I would’ve felt abandoned too.

But from my vantage point, I felt like the person stepping out so we could all meet somewhere nicer, I wanted to take her with me- eventually.

I thought I would move to Edinburgh and establish a life there and then she would follow me there. But that was my dream, not hers.

Even though I think we both thought we wanted to escape Dundee, we were once again getting lost in our differences.

So alas, that never happened.

I was lucky at the time that I had already cemented my friends in Edinburgh- probably one of the areas of contempt- so when it happened I had a support group who could see me through this difficult moment.

I was heart broken.

I missed her.

I still do miss her actually, there are times when I want to pick up my phone and message her and tell her about what I have been up to and my gut tells me that maybe one day, eventually we might be able to do that.

This break up hurt more than any romantic breakup I have ever been through.

The reason it hurt more was because it was my anchor. The friendship is where I would go to be the most vulnerable version of myself. I felt like no one else could really understand me in the same way because she had known me from when I was in Primary 2.

All good romantic relationships are built on a solid friendship.

But a solid friendship relies on a respect for each other’s differences.

We couldn’t respect each other’s differences because those differences were where we both felt the most inadequate.

Where I would fly off the handles and be quite hot headed, she would be calm and introspective and take her time to respond.

Where she might’ve sat alone and not said much, I would be up mingling making new friends.

As much as there was a surface level admiration, what was fuelling that was our desire to be it.

Why couldn’t I be calm like her?

Why couldn’t she be confident like me?

That is where we ultimately lost each other, we lost each other in the grey zone of our differences.

Friendships are where we go to be seen, it is where we can be the most embarrassing, strange versions of ourselves because we aren’t vying for sex or physical intimacy so to a large degree we can be more authentic.

Friends build lives together just the way romantic partners do.

There is an expectation that your friends are everything your partner isn’t. That they would never do to you what that shitty man did.

We often talk about romantic relationships as though they are the relationships that shape us the most.

I’m not sure if that is true.

What I hope for is if I never find partner, that I still have connection with the bat-shit people that I get to call friends.

Since breaking up with her, I have become a noticeably better friend.

I listen and don’t react (straight away), I admire and encourage the differences that lie between myself and my friends because actually it is their differences that draw me to them.

All these years later, I feel a genuine sadness.

But also a gratitude.

I have far more gratitude now for the friends in my life because I do know what it feels like to lose that. It has made me fight harder for my friendships and not only that it makes me fight harder for my friends.

No one is perfect and some friendships are bound to fall apart.

But breaking up is not an inherent failure.

Sometimes it can take years to see what the benefit of it was, but you will one day see it without the pain and fiery passion that led to the dismantling of the relationship.

When you do, you will realise that you have been taught more than you know and that your current friendships have all come as a result of your previous friendships.

I truly adore the friends I have now, I can’t help but wonder how my old best friend would fit into my life now, but I will always keep a space open for her.

My care for her didn’t dissolve when the friendship fell apart.

It is that care that I carry into my current friendships.

But it is that care that means this breakup hurts the most.