You may think I was in love with her. You would be right. But not in the way you think.
She was one of my best friends. We met in year 7 at school, but didn’t become close till after school had ended. We were linked in a way I wasn’t with anyone else. We used to take long walks along the beach. She’d hold my hand because she was cold and I have notoriously warm extremities. We talked pretty much every day. We would report back on restaurants we ate at. Every time I came back to my hometown, from uni in Perth, we’d get into a routine of watching a movie, getting food and taking it back to either one of our parent’s houses. We were close. And when we talked about travelling, we wanted to do it together.
Female friendships are tainted with societal expectations of cattiness and implicit jealousy. As much as I would like to say these things never permeated my friendships, that is not true. They did indeed manifest. For me, I was jealous of my friend’s other friends. Without the kind of stable romantic relationship that is prescribed for women my age, I was particularly fixated on the idea of being someone’s person. I wanted to be someone’s number one. And if that wasn’t within a couple, I wanted that with one of my closest friends. I wanted to be put first. I think that’s an innate need or want that carried over from neglect in childhood. I hoped that one relationship could fix the hole in my heart.
We started planning about six months before our trip. She had just finished uni and was planning a year of travelling, solo and with various friends. I was about halfway through my degree, ready to go travelling after saving up some funds and being invited to a wedding in Europe.
Our planning efforts went pretty smoothly. There were a few hiccups here and there; we didn’t agree on which cities to go to. In the end, we settled on three weeks in three cities in Italy.
We were equal amounts anal: we had an initial Google doc, a table with accommodation options and a final doc for an itinerary. I was nervous about travelling for the first time without my parents. It was all new to me: booking flights, finding safe accommodation, the sheer choice of deciding where I wanted to go. We were young women travelling alone together and we were mindful of that. I felt more secure knowing she was with me. I see now that I was too dependent on her.
When in Italy, we gelled, we took into consideration of each other’s itinerant preferences and had a mutual understanding that we didn’t have to do everything together. We flew into Venice; she ran into an old Tinder date while I was having a bath and listening to Taylor Swift while looking out on the canals. We were both enjoying ourselves. Then Chianti, we drank and ate so well. We took a cooking class at a vineyard and sipped on Italian rosé under the Tuscan sun. Finally, we were in Florence, it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I didn’t want to leave.
On our last night, we went back to one of our favourite spots, the Florence food market. We picked up a few things to have a picnic on the roof of our Airbnb. Looking out on the Florence skyline, eating delicious food and chatting with my best friend, I felt incredibly grateful and lucky to be there with her. It was a truly wonderful night. I look back on our trip and can’t find fault. It’s the last time I remember things being normal between us. Things being good.
We left Florence separately. She went off to Milan and I went to Rome, my first time solo travelling. She thanked me for our time together and I thanked her. We kept in touch, shared our experiences through messenger, the same way we did when living in two different cities in Australia. I didn’t feel a shift. Maybe I should have?
Before she came back from her longer voyage, I dropped off a few things at her house. A pair of her boots I took from her to lighten her luggage and a bottle of wine and hazelnut paste she wanted but didn’t buy due to weight, which I sneakily went back and got for her. It was an early birthday gift. When she got home she thanked me and gushed about how good of a friend I was. Something I had built my identity around.
Little did I know that only a year later, we would both be living in Perth, and when I wished her a happy birthday it would feel akin to well-wishing an aunt I hadn’t spoken to in years.
Things had changed. Geographically we were closer than we had been in the last five years of our friendship yet, she felt further away than ever. I missed her.
I would hear about how she was going through mutual friends or on social media. She was settling into my home city of five years, quite nicely, without me. She didn’t need me. This felt more real than any breakup I had read about or watched on TV or in the movies. This was just as, if not more heartbreaking than anything I had been through.
I tried to be careful about how I conveyed my pain to mutual friends. I didn’t need to throw her under the bus or try to gain sympathy, even thouh I felt our friendship had ended and she had just forgotten to tell me. I felt I wasn’t allowed to be as upset as I was. Friends grow apart, right?
Slowly, she stopped replying to my messages and I never got to see her first apartment that she previously asked me to help decorate.
After two years, we saw each other at a mutual friend’s dinner. I was determined, when it was just the two of us, to ask her what went wrong. After a somewhat awkward dinner, where we talked about our separate lives, we ended up walking home together. We actually lived on parallel streets. I had never run into her.
As we crossed over the tram line, I mustered all my courage to bring up the topic that had been weighing on me for over two years.
“I wanted to ask you. Did I do something wrong? I guess I’m surprised about how little we’ve spoken or seen each other since you moved here. If I’m being honest it hurt my feelings. I feel like I must have done something to upset you.”
“No…” she replied. “I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I guess I started this new job and I was focused on building my life here.”
“Ok…I see.”
“Well,” she began, “we should catch up more often. We should definitely see that movie we talked about at dinner. Next week?”
We hugged goodbye and I had a feeling that we wouldn’t see each other soon.
We never ended up seeing the movie. But I did send her an awkward and alarming drunk text after walking home past her street after a night out. I was no longer, in my mind, definitively in the right. This was even messier than it was before. I had to question whether or not I was the ‘good friend’ that had contributed so substantially to my identity.
I think I had fooled myself into believing asking her ‘why’ would give me closure – that the ‘why’ didn’t matter, the act of speaking my mind was enough to let go. It did help, but it also inflamed a healing wound. What helped more was time and compassion. I can now accept that we’ve both grown and changed. And I can sincerely wish her the best.
Relationships end. People grow apart. And usually, one person gets more hurt than the other. I am less bitter now. It doesn’t sting every time she’s brought up in conversation. I’ll cherish the memories of our time in Italy. We never got to exchange photos, but we shared an experience that I won’t forget. I think a small part of me will always love her. Miss our friendship. It was so important to me. I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of that fully. My aching heart will break again and sink into the memory foam crack where she left her mark. Rejection is compounding; it’s hard to separate the events that comprise it. And sensitive souls like me know that we feel it deeper and longer.
I expected by 25 that my heart would be marred by romantic partners. And I suppose in a way it was. As James Blake sang in his eerily familiar song, “In the end, it was friends, it was friends who broke my heart.”
Cover by Ketut Subiyanto; inset 1 by Aislinn Kelly; inset 2 Andrea Riondino