It just occured to me that i've gone through two best friends in the course of my soon-to-be 23 years.

Gone trough...I feel like the girl in that story where she outgrew her favorite pair of red shoes. She didn't want to give them them up, and she kept wearing it even though it pinched her feet. She'd walk to school, run in the playground, be crying her eyes out because her feet hurt. She wore them until they just didn't fit and her mom made her get new ones.

Both friendships lasted for about eight years.

It's weird.

I was six when I met Alaine, we were great friends until we were about 14. I think we started drifting apart when I moved at age 11, but I'm not sure. For some reason, I can't whether we even talked for that year.

I rember 5th to be my awkward year. I left 4th grade as one of the cute kids and came back a gawky giraffe. I went to my one and only girls scout camping trip and burned my troops breakfast sausages. I willingly took extra math classes for heaven knows why--I wasn't flunking and it was the only year that I was actually doing good with it.


I remember a lot of things, but I do not remember Alaine. I don't think I even said goodbye to her.

Just to be fair though, my parents were so worried that i'd be traumatized by the mood that they did all they could to ease the transition. Sleeping in the new house (which is just an hour away) made things seem like a vacation.

The day we moved, I didn't even know we had! I thought were just there for another weekend. It didn't even occur to me until two weeks later that I was not going to go back to my old house.

Looking back...I don't know if what my parents did resulted in more harm than good. True, I hardly felt anything. But that's the thing. I wasn't sad or happy or angry with the move. It felt like I never moved at all.

The fact that I still went to the same school, saw all my old classmates and friends, and that my grandparents still lived at the old house made things even weirder.

At the most, I should have at least complained with my changed schedule. I woke up at 4am, whereas my old time used to be 6am. I used to get home at around 4 or 4:30, which got bumped into 5:30 or six.

But I don't remember things ever being difficult, in much the same way that I don't remember drifting apart with Alaine. We still hung out during the 6rh grade, but through high school it was a different ME and HER altogether,

We had nothing in common.

One day we went to school and just...never talked. There was nothing to talk about. We weren't sad, we had other friends. We had different activities, different classes...we hardly even saw each other.

It's kind of disconcerting to bump into someone you grew up with, knew so much about--heck, was your best friend--and not have anytihing to say but "hi". Some days, there wasn't even that.

And why am I just missing her now?

...

Best friend number two wasn't even really best friend.

We were great friends, sister kind of friends, the you'll-be-maid-of-honor-in-my-wedding kind of friend. Heck, an i'd-throw-myself-in-front-of-a-car-for-you-friend.

Eight years, and after a mass tangle of incidents that I won't even write because i'msick and tired of thinking it and retelling it, we just stopped talking.

Imagine that.

I'm beginning to wonder if it's me. If this is going to be a pattern.

Ugh. This hurts my head. Go.