Friends, friends, friends.

Just over a month ago, my best friend of 11 years and I parted ways. I’ve just thought about this now, sitting at the computer desk in the library, and I’m surprised by how much this hasn’t really affected me. That sounds really bad but, oh dear God, I think I’m maturing. We met in Year 7 of secondary school (Roman Catholic co-ed) and pretty much stayed glued together since then. It was a kind of you-don’t-see-one-without-the-other thing. That’s putting a bit of a shine on it, and reducing it to its absolute basics, though. Looking back, it was never the friendship that I’d really wanted. There was one incident in I think it was Year 8, where we’d fallen out and the boys on our bus (2 of which Sarah and her sister Claire had on/off things with) made a bet that we would be mates again by the end of the week. Anyhow, we did make up by Friday, but Sarah said we had to stay quiet so she could win her bet. After I left for Chester, and she left for Manchester, we very rarely saw each other. There was one occasion a couple of months ago where I was going to Manchester for the day and she didn’t want to get out of bed an hour early to come to see me. That sounds really bitter, and I guess I am a bit. I threw a lot into our friendship, and I did expect some kind of return treatment.

For the last couple of times we’d met up, I felt on edge. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be, back in the days where we used to watch One Tree Hill all day and eat Ben and Jerry’s. I couldn’t put my finger on what had changed. Thinking now, I reckon it was simply a case of ‘growing apart’ (growingus apartus in its Latinate term). We’d taken very different paths from school: she’d chosen to go to the Grammar sixth form so she wouldn’t have to get up early for a bus, whereas I’d gone to the Catholic college twinned with our school. We were studying in a vaguely similar area at Uni, she was taking Classics and I was taking English, but we had very different feelings about our courses. I’m certainly not saying that best friends have to be very similar, but we always were, and I think it was when we changed that the friendship changed. Sarah was very boy-orientated, which I never have been, and an ex was the reason for her getting a 2:2 at Uni when she was clever enough to get a First. It was her 22nd birthday in the middle of July, and there was a family meal which she’d invited me to. We had a major argument the day after, during which a lot of unresolved issues were (loudly) aired, and it became clear that our friendship was beyond repair. We had very different priorities and views on friendship, and it would be better to leave it now.

We went to see Nickelback together last September (I bought us tickets for her 21st), and their songs always reminded me of our friendship. There’s one in particular, ‘Photograph’, which when I hear, I can almost see us driving down some pitch black country lane in my car, smoking, and singing as loudly as we possibly can. This song came on the radio a couple of weeks ago, and it made me get a bit emotional. I sent her a message saying that I didn’t want to leave our friendship on such a low note, and that I wish her luck in her life, etc. She replied saying that we don’t have to lose touch all together, and we could still be friends. I thought about this for a while, but realised that I shouldn’t cling onto the past just for the hell of it, just because that’s what I’ve done before, and I (politely) refused her offer.

One of my ‘facebook friends’ wrote the other day that you lose friends when you get older because you’re finding out who the proper ones are, and I think that’s true, but I think growing up also has a lot to do with it. I’ve had a lot of friends in relationships that aren’t happy, and I just don’t see the point in holding onto something just because it’s there. There’s that saying: ‘you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family’. That seems like a fairly poignant note to end on.