Words by: Karen Grace Prince
Art by: Janae Hunter

It’s been a little over a year since I ‘broke up’ with my best friend.

We all have that someone – a platonic soulmate; the sort of friendship that felt straight out of a novel, someone who could instantly finish your sentences. 

They were carefree, whimsical and always up for a good time – the complete polar opposite of me. Our inseparability made sense amidst the chaos of our teens, drawn together by our lack of ‘white picket fence’ lives and shared love for the weird and unconventional. Well into our twenties, we continued to stay in sync. Shared locations. Matching tattoos (sigh). Regular hangouts. Familiar routines. Countless inside jokes. We swore we were the exception to the rule of long-term friendships. 

Until one day, we weren’t. 

I could probably speak at length about what went wrong: Lies. Betrayal. Infidelity. A torrid affair. All the makings of a scandalous breakup, playing out like an episode of a badly-written sitcom. But in truth, it was a slowburn of resentment that killed us. There was no dramatic screaming match. Or a catty text exchange. Neither of us got the last word. It was simply prolonged silence and built-up spite that met its end one random Saturday night. 

The grief felt like no other. The routine of our friendship that once felt like muscle memory, became alien. I went from talking to them nearly every day to only catching glimpses of their life through social media. My thumb would hover over TikToks I knew they’d love, only to swipe up with defeated sighs. Deflecting questions about them became second nature, a way to keep myself afloat. Every happy memory we once shared felt punctuated by our animosity. 

I knew I had lost my sense of self in our friendship. I absorbed their emotions and lived through their stories while making no room for mine to exist. I placed them on a pedestal and downplayed my experiences, only to be hurt when my feelings weren’t acknowledged. 

After half a year of no-contact, I reached out to talk things through. I was determined to not let our years together be defined by a silly blip. After all, what couldn’t be fixed with a little heart-to-heart? But the air had shifted. It was too late. Neither of us rushed to fill in the gaps. Our conversation felt like riddles, tiptoeing around the unspoken treachery. It was too polite, too stilted, too mellow. It felt more like closure than reconciliation. The window of time for which we could fix our temporary glitch was being boarded up, sealing away any space for repair.

That’s when it sank in. The hurt was all that we had left to hang on to. 

A part of me still aches, even a year on. Like phantom pain, it lingers between the spaces. Yet, it’s equally freeing to exist in each other’s peripherals without the burden of expectations. We wish on birthdays. We like each other’s posts. We casually converse at group hangouts. We keep our distance, content with the quiet understanding that what we had was meaningful. Even if it’s no longer central to our lives.

Like Kafka said: “Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”

The love we once shared gave me much more than I ever hoped. It unlocked a part of myself that I never knew existed. A childlike playfulness. A wild sense of humour. A steady confidence. A lease on life that has stayed with me long after our friendship expired. 

And that feels enough for me to carry on.