What they don’t tell you is that no one can break your heart like a best friend - no one can hurt you like a best friend. All of my worst heartbreaks at the hand of every boy I’ve ever loved couldn’t compare.
She and I were inseparable.
In our hometown, no one knew us without the other - they still don’t. But what they don’t know is that we haven’t talked in over three years.
And I’m not sure why.
When I go home, people ask me how she is. They ask me where she is. If she’ll be here (wherever I am) later.
I think she’s good. I’m not sure where she is right now. I don’t know if she’s coming.
The world prepares you for a boy to break your heart, but never a best friend.
We shared secrets and saunas. Shampoo and hairbrushes, forks, straws, and spoons. We even once shared a shaving razor and toothbrush for three days because I forgot mine.
I always forgot mine and she was the one person who knew that about me.
We shared car rides, planes, hotel rooms, and beds. We saw the world together. We sang together. We laughed together. We danced together.
We were electric and everyone could feel it.
She was a permanent fixture at my parent’s house, and I at hers. There for every birthday party and graduation ceremony. Held me after my first break up, when our parents left us in our dorm rooms at college, and at every funeral. Walked me home again and again. Pulled me out of the street as a car zoomed by when I wasn’t paying attention.
Because I was lost in the euphoria of the world we created together in the name of friendship. There was no putting your finger on where one of us ended and the other began.
Until there was.
Until we began to pledge our allegiance to boyfriends and new friends. Until I went off and carved out my own path at a new school, in a new city, and a new state.
And we tried.
But somewhere along the way, when we started our careers and became our own people we lost “us.”
The last time we talked, I asked her to be in my wedding and she said,
no.
I told her I’ll always love her and she told me she’ll always love me too.
And then I fell into a puddle in my then fiancé’s arms, spending the next year wrapping my mind around the hole in my heart, mining through the years and the missteps - where it all could have gone wrong.
My younger self was a raging co-dependent filled with big emotions, riddled with rigidness, seeing only in black and white; no indication of where I ended and another person began, not fully aware of what others might need or what might be going on for them.
My present self, a recovering co-dependent making emotional regulation a daily practice (some days are better than others), working on being as flexible and as free as the ligaments and tendons in my body that allow me to touch my nose to my knees (and sometimes pop a kneecap out of place), seeing the world around me in Kodachrome, knowing that absolutely everything sits somewhere on a greyscale.
Seeing how quickly I can find where I end and another person begins - and learning that this is how I can love myself and another simultaneously.
I used to only love others.
Now I’m in tune with what you might need or what might be going on for you, while also keeping in view what I need and what might be going on for me at any given moment. And that might be the biggest accomplishment of my 20s.
I also know now that you can have more than one best friend.
She always told me that I could only have one best friend. But what does it mean when your “best friend” - your one and only, won’t stand beside you on your wedding day; where “best friends” are supposed to stand?
I had it set in my mind that the label “best friend” was reserved in her name. To create a bond as deep or deeper with someone else would somehow betray my relationship with her. So I spent my younger years putting her at the top of the friendship hierarchy, careful not to deepen my relationships with others.
And so many incredible people were begging for the depth of my ocean.
It’s funny the stories we tell ourselves - the stories we let others tell us.
Because love isn’t finite.
Our capacity for friendship isn’t finite.
I’ve come to know that to call someone your friend means that you are responsible for some of their care (thank you, Luvvie Ajayi Jones). I’ve come to know the term “best friend” as a possessive, unrealistic expectation that I don’t believe in anymore. The best friendships are the ones where you are both held and free (thank you, Glennon Doyle).
There’s a passage from writer, Jedidiah Jenkins that I found shortly after my best friend break up that sums it all up perfectly for me:
“I was asked last week, ‘who is your best friend?’ I don’t know. I don’t use language like that anymore. It doesn’t fit. I have friends that hold the keys to different doors of my personality. Some open my heart. Some my laughter. Some my mischief. Some my sin. Some my civic urgency. Some my history. Some my rawest confusion and vulnerability. Some friends, who may not be ‘the closest’ to me, have the most important key for me in a moment of my life. Some, who may be as close as my own skin, may not have what I need today. It’s okay if our spouses or our partners don’t have every key. How could they? It isn’t a failure if they don’t open every single door of who you are. The million-room-mansion of identity cannot overlap perfectly with anyone. But I will say, my closest friends have a key ring on their hip with lots of keys, jingling.”
Now, I either use the term “best friend” for everyone, or no one at all - because I’m not only into smashing the patriarchy, but also hierarchies.
I told you that I have a new best friend and she’s come to hold a key ring with lots of keys jingling. And what she’s shown me is that no one can love you like a friend. There is nothing more healing than “when you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you can stand in front of them bare and their response is, ‘You’re safe with me.’” - to quote The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
As Taylor Jenkins Reid goes on to write, “That’s intimacy.” It’s an intimacy unrivaled even by marriage and necessary to our survival - especially as women.
Friendship is the most important ship you can board. It is the most holy union. It can feel like what church was supposed to feel like.
I’m so beyond grateful for all of my friends - all of my best friends and the keys that they hold, unlocking different parts of my personality and my identity, holding up mirrors, and reminding me of who I am.
When I first shared the key analogy in a long-lost Instagram post, I also shared that I’ve become extremely mindful of who holds keys in the first place (a good practice that I still stand by). But I also shared at the time that I’ve come to terms with the fact that sometimes we have to reclaim those keys when rent isn’t being paid anymore to make room for those who are relentlessly knocking on the door saying, “I’m here.”
While I’m a big proponent of reclaiming keys when a friendship isn’t serving you anymore or feels unhealthy, I’ve come to realize that you can leave a key under the doormat of your heart for an old friend should she come back.
Because there’s still a part of me that only she can unlock.
This is achingly beautiful. Thank you for sharing
Shew, lady. This was a brilliant piece that hit me square in the gut. I too remember reading that Jenkins passage and knowing that I had just read words I had been dying to hear my whole life. Now, please excuse my while I go ugly cry about the keys we leave under our door mats. Thanks for writing this. As always, love you lots!