The girl you used to know
You step into your classroom and take your customary seat, relishing in the comfort of sitting among friends while studiously keeping your gaze forward, away from the place where another girl sat.
You remember the days when you sought out that other girl’s presence whenever you stepped into a room, but now you avoid even glancing in her direction. You want to let your open wounds heal and you want to convince her that you had purged her from your life.
(Yet every now and then when you hear her laugh, you feel a stabbing pain in your gut, so perhaps you’re just convincing yourself.)
You remember plenty of your friendship, each and every year of it — the initial elation at discovering someone so similar in snarkiness and sarcasm, the feeling when both of you voice the same thought at the same time and the way she always called you by your full name to the point that you can’t imagine her calling you by your first name.
(These days she does not call your name at all, and wants nothing to do with you because you’re not as funny, as lively or as relevant as her new friends.)
You remember the first time she pretended that she didn’t hear you and the first time she pretended that you were not standing right next to her, trying to talk to her. You remember the unfamiliar, uncomfortable gnawing in your stomach that put a little crease between your brows as you pretended that she was not ignoring you while alarms started blaring in your mind.
(It took you a month to walk away from a friendship that had died a long time ago, a month of flogging the proverbial dead horse before realising that the only one being beaten up was yourself, and that the girl you knew and loved was as dead as the horse.)
Now you laugh without reservation with another girl, and as painful as it might have been, you’re almost glad that you were so deserted abruptly. Now you’re confident that even though losing a friend feels like drowning, you’re adept at treading water. Now you know that even if someone rips a little bit of you away, you’ll be crippled but undefeated and that eventually, you’ll heal.
You still don’t glance in her direction, but that’s okay, because you’ve learnt ways of living your life without her. One day, you might even be grateful.