To The Best Friend I Left Behind

To the best friend I left behind,

Hey, remember me? We used to get home from school, dump our bags in the hallway and slump on your couch. We’d spend hours lounging around, watching movies or scrolling through our phones, half cooked conversations about what so-and-so did in class and tagging each other in funny videos even though we were only metres apart. (Why were we so obsessed with this video?)

We got drunk together for the first time, on Cruisers like a couple of twelvies, having the time of our lives before learning what it was like to be wasted and falling to our knees in front of a toilet while we threw our rainbow-coloured guts up. Remember walking home from school and grabbing 7/11 slushies and a $5 bag of hot chips? Or the time I nearly killed us both when I first got my P’s but you still came out on 2am Maccas trips for nuggets and Kmart runs anyway?

We spent every day together in high school, you helped make my teenage years. School photo days and PE lessons, study sessions in the library where we never got anything done and bus rides home. ‘Give me a bite’ and ‘wanna try this?’ at recess and lunch, ‘I need to go to the bathroom’ and both of us getting up without fail. Group messages trying to organise house parties and trips to the beach or just mucking around at the park after school. Writing texts to cute boys who don’t realise their messages are being screenshotted and analysed to death. Inside jokes that meant we could just look at each other and crack up in the middle of class, even after our teachers told us they’d had enough.

Sometimes you say goodbye to people and you’re not sure why.

People told us that when we graduated we would move on from people- that we would leave behind the friends we grew up with. And sure, some small part of us probably knew that without waking up and spending six hours a day with each other meant things would be different.

But I don’t think we ever saw this coming. Or maybe we did, and we just ignored it. From Snapchat streaks and messaging all day to silence. From massive paragraphs posted on our birthdays at 12:01 on the dot to the obligatory ‘have a good one x’. From best friends to strangers.

Gone are the days where we would complain about our parents, copy each other’s Maths homework or spend hours having late-night conversations in the car. Life just got in the way, we went to different uni’s and made brand new friends. We got new jobs or stayed stuck in old ones. Sometimes things change, and we do too. Sometimes we grow apart, but I still miss you. 

Year13 gets it. We get what it feels like to grow apart from mates. We get it when it comes to travel and study. We get it when comes to work...

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