I Miss My Best Friend

I test drove 3 official best friends before I met 'The One.'

The first claimed me as her bestie on the first day of 3rd grade, at a new school for both of us. I was euphoric, accompanied by an instant ally. No one could separate me from her. I thought we would grow up together. But the following year we were put into separate classrooms and she quickly claimed someone else without looking back. Our friendship was inconvenient, so it ended.

The next year I found a new best friend who lived just up the street. She was the prettiest girl in our school and I thrived on being her side-kick. We talked about the things she liked. We went to the places she liked. We followed the boys she liked. She was very intelligent and interesting, she kept me entertained. But at some point, I realized she never asked what I liked. So I tested her, with some of my own, small propositions and quickly discovered that if I wasn't validating her, she wanted no part of me. Our friendship was conditional, so it ended.

Two years later, I finally found a new sister. We sat next to each other in every class. We ate lunch together on the 7th grade wall. We made secret calls on our bedroom phones past curfew. She was the keeper of my secrets and dreams. But our respective parents weren't especially friendly with each other. Her parents became besties with another couple, who had a daughter our age and the group shared vacations, holidays and BBQs. The families even moved in next door to one another. They all bonded together in ways I couldn't compete with. My friend finally told me she had a new best friend and she was sorry. Our friendship wasn't the priority anymore, so it ended.

After that, I stopped looking for someone to call my best friend. I figured it was juvenile. I tried to be a friend to everyone. But I missed knowing that I had a partner to call my own.

I met "The One" when we were both 15. She was loud, abrasive and opinionated- a big departure from my own personality. From our very first encounter, she insisted that we were meant to be friends. She even started calling me her best friend publicly, when I still considered her to be a mere acquaintance. It was ridiculous and overbearing at the time. But her earnestness and tenacity broke through my reservations. Once again I allowed a girl to link arms with me and claim me as her best friend.

We were inseparable for 10 years.

If anyone really understood me, it was her. We talked about everything. I knew her deepest, darkest secrets. I played witness to her brightest victories and her crushing defeats. With her, I could just be myself. There is such a relief when you trust someone enough to be real, to get angry, to be imperfect, to be ridiculous. I never had to be someone else with her.

But we were very different people. While we met in the middle, she had her extra friendships, I had mine and they didn't overlap much. If we were a ven diagram, there would be a very small space where our two circles melded perfectly. She thrived in chaos- dungeon clubs with black lights and sticky floors. I was a rule follower, getting straight A's and only dating one boy throughout high school. From an outside perspective, we may have seemed an odd couple.

Somehow, the things that really mattered to us were more important than any small details of personality. We listened to the same music. We knew every word to the same movies. We distrusted the same people. We prayed to the same God. When I wanted to ruminate on the BIG QUESTIONS of life, love, and the meaning of everything, it would be with her over a coffee. We could talk about nothing for hours.

We planned to grow old together.

Then one day she asked me for a ride to an unfamiliar address. Without thinking twice, I took her. It was late, too late to be respectable. But we were freshmen in college and I enjoyed dabbling in her wilder side. As we pulled up to the house she got very serious. "Turn off your lights, quick," she warned, in a rushed whisper. I did as instructed and she proceeded to shove my head beneath the dashboard sightline. "Keep your head down, don't let anyone see you out here," she scolded.

"What's going on," I asked, keeping my head low?

"I can't guarantee your safety," she said, "It's better for both of us if they don't know you're here."

Heart thumping in my throat, I grabbed her arm, "What are you talking about? Where are we?"

"It's best if you just don't know," she admitted without regret and a touch of pity. She slid out of the car and all I could hear were her chunky wedge sandals beating the pavement.

I lay paralyzed in the front seat of my sedan, in the dark, for over an hour. Cell phones hadn't been invented yet; I only had a useless pager, for other people's emergencies, in my purse. This was before GPS, I had no idea where I was and couldn't be sure I knew how to get myself home without her. The street felt very sinister in its unfamiliarity. Why would she leave me out there alone?

"Start the engine, start the engine," she hissed as soon as she opened the car door. It wasn't until we had driven several miles that she would even look at me.

"What was that, back there," I demanded?

She had her mirrored box with her, the box where she kept her recreational drugs. She had found it in an antique shop and loved the beveled edges and the way parts of the mirror had faded black. She had once told me that if she was going to do drugs, it would be with style. Shushing me with a wave of her hand, she organized its contents with satisfaction and stowed the box in the backpack she always carried.

"Did you buy drugs," I yelled? "Am I transporting drugs in my car? Get them out!" I started to pull the car over.

"I know you're not going to understand," she began, pointing to the road and urging that I continue to drive, "But they cut the drugs with all kinds of dangerous things. It's better to go to the bigger dealers who have the purer stuff, buy in bulk if you can afford it, and sell off the extra. But these aren't the kind of people you mess with. They don't take kindly to outsiders. They wouldn't have appreciated me bringing you. There's a way they conduct business. They need to know who they can trust. You have to be willing to show them you're not a liability."

The traffic lights blurred as I tried to follow her driving directions. I was livid. She had made me an accessory to her drug dealing. "I can't believe you asked me to take you to buy drugs! Am I in danger? What have you gotten me into?"

"Oh calm down," she shook her full head of curls and sniffed, pulling the sun-visor mirror down to look up her nostrils.

"Are you high," I seethed, pounding the top of the steering wheel?

"Listen," she said, sounding bored, "You have to sample the product so they know you're not a nark. You're fine, don't worry about it. I just didn't want them to ask you to go down on someone or something, to prove your cool, since I knew you wouldn't know what to do with a table full of lines."

"Are you prostituting yourself," I whispered in disbelief.

She pulled out a cigarette before remembering that she couldn't smoke in my car. Her manicured fingers were always more elegant than mine, with her fine bones and smooth skin. The cigarette rolled back and forth between her knuckles as she stared out the window. "It's not prostituting," she murmured, "If you want to do it."

We drove the rest of the way in silence. I wanted to be far away from her and her pretty box. My scrutiny affronted her and she wanted to be as far away from me. In a relationship where we lived and let live, we had reached an impasse.

"Don't ever bring drugs into my car again," I demanded as she sulked back out into the night. She didn't bother to answer me.

We moved on as though that night had never happened, visiting coffee shops, meandering through Tower Records, and gossiping about mutual acquaintances. But she rarely rode in my car again and when we were together she never had her mirrored box. It was as though a silent treaty had been signed. I didn't ask and she didn't tell.

Of course, I knew she was still doing drugs. She was my bosom buddy. I could tell the signs. On an average day, she walked around with a full gallon of water that she would chug as though she had just sprinted a 100-meter dash. She sniffed and gagged often. Her pearly skin broke out with her first zits. The purple veins beneath her eyes grew darker. Her silhouette melted thinner and thinner, but she lacked muscle tone and womanly softness. She became all pointy angles and sleepless nights. I was waiting for her to grow out of it.

Then she got a big girl job in LA and moved away. We stayed in touch as much as we could. We would drive back and forth the 2 hours every other month or so. But distance and time took its toll. When she might have been with me normally, she was out with new friends who loved to party as much as she did. When we met up, we went through the old routine, visiting the same haunts, sipping mochas, and chatting about long-gone mutual friends. Without new shared experiences, we became merely observers of one another's lives.

"I screwed the VP in the executive bathroom," she whispered over the phone one night. I wasn't even sure what we were talking about. We might have been having 2 separate conversations, we were on such different wavelengths. "He gave me a promotion and a baggie. He also let me pick out 9 pairs of designer shoes. Can you believe it, 9 pairs?" I didn't even know what to say.

Over the following year, her life seemed to revolve around more and more sexual favors given in exchange for drugs or designer brand samples. She said I didn't understand because I didn't live in LA and I didn't work for a major fashion house. She had an important job, with even more important people. My disapproval angered her and the phone calls got fewer and fewer. But she still introduced me as her best friend. I still identified as her best friend and I still believed we would grow old together.

Her life fell apart one day. It seemed like it came out of nowhere, I was so blind. Her roommate called to tell me that forged checks had been written by my best friend, she had lost her job and no one could find her. When she finally emerged, she was skinnier than ever and speaking so fast and disjointedly, that it was obvious her recreational drugs had become essential drugs. The few of us who knew her well staged an intervention.

It was supposed to be a PBS special. We expected her to be defensive, we knew there would be anger and tears. But in the end, everyone was supposed to make up and hug. She would get the help she needed, so we could get back to the business of being best friends.

She told us to fuck off.

For months I didn't hear from her. I thought of her often, but I wanted her to come back to me with the desire to get clean. With such a historic bond between us, I believed our love for one another was stronger than any addiction. You sacrifice for the ones you love. It never occurred to me that drugs might be stronger than that.

At a local coffee shop, as I ordered a mocha with extra whip cream, I noticed a check taped to the register. My best friend's name was on the upper left corner, with a photocopy of her driver's license. Beside it was a note saying, "BAD CHECK LIST." My hope for a bright future together deflated just a little bit more.

The following week, her newest roommate tracked me down. I had never met him, though he knew everything about me-the best friend. He seemed nice enough as he asked if I knew where my best friend was. Their apartment had been burgled. When he came home from work, almost all of their stuff was gone, including all of the furniture. The police wanted to talk to her. They wondered if she had had anything to do with it. He was adamant that she would not have done anything to hurt him. I couldn't help him locate her. Though I doubted her innocence, I didn't implicate her with any of my own beliefs. She was still my best friend in my heart.

Then she walked into the shop I was managing one evening. Her eyes were clear and everything I loved about her was still there, through the gaunt skin and the acne. We chatted and I pretended that no time had passed. We laughed, as we did most of the time we were together. A healing calm descended on my soul, as I breathed in the most important relationship of my life at that time. Without thinking it through very hard, I decided to let her back in. I would do whatever I needed to do to help her and we would get through her demons as sisters. She was the only person who really showed up for me, just me.

Ready to close up shop for the night, I went into the backroom for some paperwork. She was in the middle of telling a story and I could still hear her through the small door as I grabbed what I needed from the employee's only area. I took my time, calling back to her at funny parts of her tale. Then I shuffled through my purse to get my shop keys so I could lock up. She made a few jokes, we laughed and I came back out into the shop proper to walk her out the door, as was company policy.

She looked startled. She looked nervous. She didn't look like someone who was just telling a funny story.

I looked over at the register and then I looked back at her. She blushed. Everything I had believed for so many years about the sanctity of our bond, about the commitment of a friendship like ours, slipped away. I suddenly saw a strung-out stranger standing before me. "Put the money on the counter," I said with stone-cold confidence, "And get the hell out of my shop."

"It's not like that," she put her hands up.

I looked her in the eye and pointed at the counter. With shaking fingers, she slipped her hand into her sweater pocket and pulled out a wad of twenties. Twenties I would have been responsible for when I had counted out my till. Twenties that could have gotten me fired. She had been willing to get me fired over a few twenties.

"Get out and don't come back," I smoldered, just as angry as I was heartbroken. When I locked the door that night, I knew our friendship had truly ended.

But I didn't stop thinking about her. When I spoke of her, on auto-pilot, I still called her my best friend. When I dreamed of her, she was still the vibrant person I loved. I still wanted to have her as my best friend, the way she had been before. In some unspoken fantasy, she was going to listen to me over coffee and we would be maid of honors at each other's weddings.

It was about a year later when I got a phone call asking me if I needed a ride to her funeral. She had overdosed the night before her wedding. A wedding I had not been invited to. As her "best friend" those in the know wanted to tell me about her death in person. But I was out of the area and no one knew how to find me. It was a mutual acquaintance who called me that day, thinking I may not want to drive in my grief. I was an 8-hour drive away and had no way of making it to the memorial in time.

I have since grieved for 20 years over my friend. I don't believe I could have saved her from herself. When I look back, her life didn't fall apart in one day and our friendship didn't end as abruptly as it felt. At one time we were two parallel lines and one of us, or both of us, altered our course by a single degree. At first, the distance seemed minimal and surmountable. But when two lines diverge, even the smallest amount, they eventually land in completely different directions. Nothing is fixed. Relationships are ever-changing. Love is an evolution, not a destination. Unless you work to come back to each other, the best friendship will end.

I have never replaced her.