To the person I wish I could still call my friend,

I’m not sure where to start. I don’t know what happened, but somehow, I went from feeling so close to you to pretending I don’t even know you. Maybe I overestimated our friendship, maybe you didn’t feel the same way that I felt about you. I want to believe it was real, though. I want to believe that there were times when we shared a real bond through our inside jokes, times when we were genuinely happy to be in each other’s company.

In retrospect, I should have seen the red flags that were popping up. Me feeling strange and not like myself around you. Us fighting over petty things and never coming to a resolution. You calling me out on things that honestly didn’t seem like a big deal. Signs were there, but I wanted to ignore them. I wanted to think that our friendship was more durable than it turned out to be.

Every time I see you, I pretend I don’t, because I feel too awkward. Every time I see you, I still feel hurt and I desperately want to know what went wrong, I want to start over. I want to apologize, but also, do I need to apologize? Was it really my fault? Was it your fault? Was it no one’s fault? I tell myself: some things just aren’t meant to be. But that doesn’t do much to take away the sadness. I want to move on, but it’s hard.

I think time will be on my side, though. I have slowly transitioned from anger to sadness and that sadness is in the process of turning into a neutral feeling, and perhaps some forgiveness. Forgiveness for you, but also forgiveness for myself because I need to realize that though relationships are driven by the people in them, there are aspects of them that cannot easily be controlled. Some things just aren’t meant to be.

Time has also given me the chance to make amazing friends who I feel so happy to be with. People who I laugh endlessly with, people whose problems I share, people who I have no hesitation in calling my second family. I feel like I have found true friendship when I compare it to my past experiences.

I wonder why I continually fall into this cycle of trust and betrayal, and I realized it is because I always trust people fully until they break my trust. And I think that is good because it’s better to be hurt temporarily and recuperate gradually than to live half-heartedly and in fear.

So I hope that even though you’ve moved on, you find your own second family. I hope you find people you trust fully because we all deserve that.