Best Memory or Worst Mistake

I had a best friend at 17. She was that one person in my whole life that I was closer to than my own family members. We'd sit together at lunch and text each other about nothing until one of us fell asleep in the middle of a conversation. And the times when she'd laugh at something absolutely ridiculous I'd just said, I would feel like I won something. I never felt like I needed a girlfriend, really. She was taking up that space in my life, and I felt like something good would come out of it.

So I just said it out loud... just not to her.

I told my friends she was my girlfriend. Now I know what you're thinking. No way, she wasn't, and I never even thought to ask her or hint at it at all. I just kinda decided in my own head that it was true or would be soon, and to me that felt close enough to tell other people I trusted. I was getting ready to actually tell her too. I used to practice it walking to school, trying out different ways of bringing it up that wouldn't make me sound like a total idiot.

Then one day she told me just casually that she liked some other guy in our class.

I don't even remember what I said back to her. I do remember nodding and trying to be supportive because that's what you're supposed to do when someone tells you something like that. After that I remember just sort of zoning out on my way home. My brain had this weird blank spot where that whole walk just disappeared.

I didn't cry in front of her, that wasn't going to happen, but I cried inside. I just started answering slower, and we stopped texting like we used to. I told myself I was probably better off just keeping my dignity intact rather than admitting to myself that I was breaking apart a little bit every day.

Thing I wasn't thinking about at all is the little white lie that I had just told other people about her.

One thing about high school is that when you tell one person something, then that person goes and tells their girlfriend, then she mentions it to her friend at practice, and by the time everyone has got it, it's not a "he said they were close" anymore. It's "he's been telling everyone she's his girlfriend and she doesn't even know". By the time it got back to her, the heartbreak was massive. I felt like an awkward and submissive kid who'd just been dumped for the second time.

She never even asked me about it. She just blocked me. I didn’t even get the chance to explain it all. One day I existed in her world and the next day, I was like a total stranger. I even tried calling her from a friend's phone, then tried every app I could think of to get in touch with her. She blocked me on every single one of them. Two years of being each other's person were over in a matter of hours, and I never even got the chance to tell her my last words.

Finals were just 3 weeks away when this disaster happened, and the universe had a twisted sense of humor. I’d sit down with my notes, try to focus, but all I could do was stare at the same sentence. A week before the exams started, I’d had a moment of utter desperation and called her from a payphone so she didn't know it was me. All I really wanted was 30 seconds to just tell her that I never meant for it all to spiral out of control as it did. She picked up for a second and then hung up. And of course, to rub it in and add insult to injury, she blocked that number too.  

I went and sat my exams on pretty much fumes. I had no idea how to even describe it at 17. My scores were a little bit lower than I wanted. What came after wasn't exactly sadness, but a dull and heavy cloud over my head that hung around for 4 months. I'd wake up feeling knackered and lose all interest in things I used to really care about. And when my parents asked what was wrong, I just told them I was stressed about school, when it wasn’t just my grades that were stressing me.

Eventually I deleted every photo of us and the messages, and I blocked her number, though it was mostly just a symbolic gesture at that point. She'd made it pretty clear earlier what she thought of me. I told myself that was the end of it, but it wasn't.

Nowadays I get missed calls from numbers I don't know, with no voicemail or follow-up texts. Then when I follow up, it's always her old mates, the same friends reaching out of the blue after all these years. And I know exactly who's behind it even if I've got no proof.

And I’m stuck on the tiny details from all this, the little things that should have rung a bell before everything came crashing down. Taking a different path from mine so that we wouldn't run into each other. I even wish for that moment when a teacher sat us together, and she gave me that strange look, never happened.

I've replayed the whole thing so many times that I've lost track of how many. Was I really her friend, or just some person she was tolerating? Did the rumor break something real, or was it just an accelerant to an ending that was coming anyway?

To be honest, I don't have a single clear thought about the whole thing, and I've stopped expecting one. Some of this stuff is just going to stay a big mess, no matter how many times I rip it apart trying to find a version that makes some kind of sense.

I do know that two versions of the same truth exist and they can't both be right. A part of me remembers those two years as the absolute best time I've ever had. I mean, easy, warm, simple in a way that none of the stuff that came after has been. Another part of me remembers the night before the biggest exam of my life when someone who used to be the center of my universe had me so hung up, I was completely over my own head.

You know, that might actually be the real thing I need to admit to, and not that stupid thing I said to my friends all those years ago. But the one I still tell myself after all these years is who she was to me, and whether I'm even remembering her right anymore. I also wonder who we could have become.