Sketches in Memorandum | "To an Old Friend"

Do you know what happens when two sheets of paper are glued together and torn apart? If the bond was good and true, the sudden separation will leave one page intact, but with little pieces of its former counterpart forever attached to it, while the other will bear long, great scars from the loss of those pieces.

I have often found that people can be the same way.

I had a friend, once—a best friend—and then, one day, I…didn’t. I cannot say the exact moment the rip happened, save that it was during the wintertime. I also do not know if she kept the pieces of me, in spite of my foolish yearning to reach out to her; all I know for sure is that I have the scars to prove she’s gone.

It wasn’t romantic. Not really. I like to think it went beyond the strata of infatuation and courtship into a melding of the souls that only siblings can really enjoy. So why, I wonder, does this whole catastrophe feel like a messy breakup?

Despite what she did to me, I still think highly of her. She was truly special—my first real friend in years. My childhood best friend had been several years younger than me, and eventually he made many friends his own age and we sort of just…it wasn’t a rip. It was more like an old poster peeling off a wall. The glue’s gone, and even though I still see him from time to time, it hasn’t been the same ever since.

I don’t think it ever will be.

Her, though…

Some context might be needed.

After my family had moved away from Texas when I was very young, I had never really fit in at my new school—not even after a decade with the same classmates. In middle school, I became a psychological punching bag—not a difficult feat by any means. Imagine being a stuttering, easily annoyed, socially inept sixth-grade boy who takes everything far too seriously—even “your mom” jokes. By the time I reached ninth grade, I just didn’t exist. If you’ve never been invisible, all I can say is that being teased day and night is much more preferable. Humans, blessedly and unfortunately, are social animals, so attention—even negative attention—will always be preferable to the loneliness of cool and unwavering indifference.

Why didn’t I just leave? Well, until recently, the uncertainty of change terrified me. That school and those classmates were all I had known since the first grade. But I left anyway. Started going to a sort of community homeschool. Apparently, homeschool was where all the other nerds, outcasts, and weirdoes like me went. I had found my people.

I had found her.

I wouldn’t say we became fast friends. Glue takes a while to dry. Once it did, though, it seemed we were inseparable. It was like we had been cast from the same mold. We were readers, writers, artists, actors. We shaped each other. She made me, and I made her. She got me into Sherlock. I got her into Discworld (an unimaginably important recommendation, but that’s a story for another time). It was concert. It was harmony. It was delightful. We could talk endlessly about anything. Whenever we got to see each other, it was never long enough—especially when we both started going to different schools after our sophomore year. We became increasingly important to each other. I took her to our senior prom. She called me the Sam to her Frodo, which remains one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. She confided in me things I still have not told anyone. Secrets. Stories. Gripes. I still foolishly treasure many of them in my heart.

Even now, I am not sure if things are truly over. As friends, I mean. Come to find out, it was far from personal—in a sense, this is worse to me. The Sam to her Frodo was just an afterthought, now. She’d shut everyone out, stopped writing, stopped drawing, gone steady with some guy—something she’d always expressed complete disinterest about. That was years ago, too. If I were to see her again, I doubt I would even recognize her.  She’s a completely different person, now.

She doesn’t even answer to the same name I knew her by.

I think the climax of our friendship was the decision to write together. Serpent’s Star, we called it. It was to be a crossover, of sorts. Set in a world of her imagining, host to a few characters of my own. It never actually happened, but there were plans. Well, to those who have read my excerpt, I mean to say it never happened like it was supposed to.

“To an old friend,” the dedication now reads, “Good luck and goodbye.”

I like to think some of my best work is on those pages. Whether I did it for her, the memory of her, as a therapeutic act, or for the sake of not letting the story die, I am unsure. As the years pass, I find myself unable to finish it. It’s just not the same without her, and writing it won’t bring her back. Whether I wish it to or not, the story is dying. The memory is dying. Pages upon pages of some of my finest existing work, all wasted on someone who’s never coming back.

It’s the way the rip happened that angers and saddens me most. She couldn’t even tell me herself. It just came as a text one day in February or March saying she needed some space for a while. She’d delivered these same words to all her other friends, as well, but I wouldn’t know for some time. If I’d known things would end this way, I don’t know if I would have ever approached her. Was all the good she did me worth this heartbreak? All the kind words and solemn declarations of everlasting friendship turned to lies? All the waiting as of the faithful dog Hachiko for her to come back, only to learn months later from a third party why she never would?

I don’t know if I’ve forgiven her. I don’t know if I actually mean the words in Serpent’s Star’s dedication. A wounded heart is a bitter thing. I’ve managed, built new bridges—burned some, even—but sometimes I can’t stop thinking about her. I kept the drawing she made for me—the one mentioned in “My Old Desk” of Benedict and Mako. It sits on my dresser, now. Sometimes it feels like I should destroy it or hide it—like a fondly-worded card she wrote to me which I couldn’t bear to keep—but I’m no iconoclast. A work of art is an innocent child, and this one stands as a memorial to a happier time when I had a best friend. I will shelter it, and display it proudly as I always have.