In the beginning you don’t really think about the future. Eventually you feel like you’re the best of friends and that’s what you tell people; “My best friend? Yeah, she’s a dancer” “My best friend is an amazing singer” “Oh, we’ve been best friends since fourth grade”. Then, soon enough, those words are no longer just a much enjoyed claim to your elementary bragging rights. They become a lifeline, the thin string that’s holding you to what you have left of your friendship. Time happens, space happens, and, no matter what you do to hold it back, change happens. Even if you were the same people you used to be, how could you stop the inevitable addition of people more relatable after those years of comfortable denial, thinking you were so similar? Or, soon enough, the first boyfriend; who steals her heart, and your most common topic of conversation, away? It becomes harder to keep in touch, sometimes feels like you’re the only one who remembers what it was like to be so inseparable, and soon enough you’re the only one who seems to care. You have others, but all you want is the simplicity of the past, the easiness of knowing each other through and through, not having to grope at fading memories for some sort of strength. Growing up is so painful, and it doesn’t make it any easier that all anyone has to say on the subject is “it’s natural, everybody goes through it”. Everyone is so impossibly different… so how could this possibly hurt the same way?