She was there with me before I even knew what the word meant. I met her when I was barely two and a half years old. We grew up together, went to the same school for ten years, attended the same skating classes, and collected memories that I thought would stay with us forever. Among every friend I have ever had, she was the one I trusted the most. Not casually. Not halfway. I trusted her with my whole heart. Fourteen years is a long time to know someone. Long enough to believe you know them by heart. Long enough to think that no matter what happens, you will always find your way back to each other. I genuinely believed that. Until one ordinary night changed the way I looked at our entire friendship. We were talking as usual. Late-night gossip, random conversations, and plans about how we would spend our holidays after our tenth board exams. Nothing seemed wrong. We were just two best friends talking about the future, completely unaware that our friendship was about to become a part of the past. The next day, I was blocked. WhatsApp. Instagram. Snapchat. Even my phone number. Everywhere. I remember wondering what had happened. What had I said? What had I done? How could someone who had known me for fourteen years suddenly decide that I didn’t deserve even a single explanation? I tried everything I could think of to reach her. I contacted mutual friends. I asked them to talk to her for me. Sometimes she blocked them, too, or refused to reply simply because they asked her to unblock me. I even reached out to her boyfriend, hoping he might tell me what was going on. All I got was a cold, empty And I was left with questions that had nowhere to go. At first, I told myself it would only last a few days. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she needed space. Maybe she would calm down and come back. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. And the silence continued. My 10th Boards Holidays went very bad because of it. For three months, I waited. I tried to understand. I kept looking for a way to fix something without even knowing what had broken. Eventually, a thought crossed my mind. Deep down, I had a feeling she would come back someday. But I also knew something else. If I had spent three months trying to reach someone who kept choosing not to hear me, perhaps I shouldn’t be waiting in the same place when they finally decided to return. Because this wasn’t the first time. Whenever something went wrong between us, I was usually the one who reached out first. Even when she was the one who had hurt me, I would eventually return, hoping we could go back to normal. I don’t remember her being the one to apologise first. And somewhere along the way, I started accepting things I shouldn’t have had to keep accepting. Her mood swings. Her sudden distance. The way I was expected to understand her feelings while mine seemed to come second. She had apparently told people that she had for blocking me. Many reasons. And I couldn’t help wondering whether any of those reasons had ever mattered enough for her to sit down and talk to me instead. Was I really so difficult to talk to? Was my friendship worth so little that a conversation was too much to ask for? I had already spent so much time feeling small in front of her. There was a girl I had always felt insecure about, and my best friend would compare me with her and then laugh, as if it were nothing. Perhaps it was nothing to her. But it wasn’t nothing to me. I would carry those moments long after she had forgotten them. I would question myself, wonder whether I was somehow less than the people she compared me with, and feel hurt by the one person I thought would understand me best. I kept asking myself why I had to be the one who understood everything. Why did I have to make room for her feelings when she didn’t seem to make the same room for mine? Everyone around me started telling me the same thing. “You deserve a better friend.” Even people close to both of us told me I should walk away. But I didn’t listen. I had convinced myself that friendships that survived more than a decade were supposed to last forever. I thought our history meant something neither of us could simply throw away. I thought that knowing someone since childhood meant they would always treat your heart with a little more care. I was wrong about that. Because sometimes, the people who have known us the longest are still capable of hurting us in ways we never expected. And then, after three months, an Instagram request from her appeared. I wasn’t surprised. Somewhere deep down, I had always believed she would come back. By then, I had changed schools. She was still at our old school, surrounded by new people, new faces, and new friendships. She had a fight with the people there, and, from where I stood, it seemed she had nobody to turn to. So she came back to me. And what did I do? I spoke to her as if nothing had happened. I welcomed her back into conversations as though I hadn’t spent three months wondering why I had suddenly become someone she could live without. I acted normal while something inside me was still trying to understand what had happened. Maybe I thought that if we could talk again, I could somehow get back the friendship we used to have. Maybe I was simply relieved to have her back. Or maybe, after fourteen years, I still didn’t know how to be anything other than the friend who was always there for her. But things weren’t the same. Our conversations became ordinary. Mostly gossip, the usual things we used to talk about. She sounded the same. I was the one who had changed. My prespective of that friendship has changed. Because now, every time we talked, a question quietly followed me. I hated that thought. I hated that a friendship which had once felt so familiar could now make me so uncertain. I hated that I couldn’t simply enjoy talking to her without wondering whether the conversation might be one of our last. And the worst part?

The pattern seemed to continue. Whenever she had a fight with people at school, she would come to me. I would be there, ready to listen, ready to talk, ready to make space for her again. But when things were fine, there were no random reels, no casual “How are you?”, no little efforts to stay connected. I wasn’t asking for her attention every second of the day. I just wanted to feel that our friendship existed even when she didn’t need somewhere to turn. I wanted to know that I was her friend because she wanted me in her life, not only because she needed someone when everything else went wrong. And every time she returned, I let her in. Maybe that was my mistake. Or maybe I had simply loved our friendship for so long that I didn’t know how to stop showing up for it. There was another thing I found out later. One of the reasons she had blocked me was that she thought I was jealous of her relationship. I still struggle to understand that. I remember being genuinely happy when she told me she had found someone who made her happy. I was over the moon for her. I wanted her to experience the kind of happiness she deserved. And somehow, that happiness had been mistaken for jealousy. It hurt in a way I couldn’t explain. Not just because she misunderstood me, but because she had known me for fourteen years. Fourteen years of conversations. Fourteen years of memories. Fourteen years of being part of each other’s lives. And still, she believed something about me that felt so far from the truth. If I had known that was the reason, I would have stopped trying to reach her through our mutual friends much earlier. I wouldn’t have spent so much time desperately looking for answers without knowing what I was even supposed to defend myself against. That one reason was painful enough. I didn’t even want to know what the others were. And that was the moment something shifted in me. I stopped putting the same effort into our friendship. I stopped believing that the number of years you have known someone guarantees that they will understand you. For a while, I even stopped believing in friendships the way I used to. Because how do you return to being carefree with someone who has shown you how easily they can shut you out? How do you trust someone again when you have already experienced what it feels like to be left without an explanation? Perhaps she thinks everything is normal now. Perhaps, to her, blocking me was never as significant as it was to me. Maybe she has moved on from those three months completely. But I haven’t forgotten what they felt like. And I don’t think she understands that. The thing is, we do talk now. We laugh sometimes. We gossip. We have conversations that probably sound exactly like the ones we used to have. If someone looked at us from the outside, they might think nothing had changed. But they wouldn’t hear the questions inside my head. They wouldn’t know that a part of me is always careful now. That I sometimes hold myself back because I don’t know what might upset her. That even when she is talking to me normally, I am afraid of what might happen if things suddenly go wrong. That fear has become an unwanted part of our conversations. And I keep wondering: is this what friendship is supposed to feel like? I never thought I would have to write about her this way. I never thought that someone who had been part of my life for fourteen years would become the person behind words like these. But here I am, writing things she may never read. And if she does read them, I don’t know whether she will understand. I worry that it might make everything awkward. I worry that she might misunderstand me again. I even worry that saying how I feel could somehow give her another reason to leave. And isn’t that the saddest part? I am afraid to speak honestly to someone I once trusted with everything. Sometimes, I wonder whether she has ever stopped to think about what those three months did to our friendship. Whether she understands that she could have spoken to me the very next day. That we could have talked, disagreed, explained ourselves, and perhaps sorted everything out. Instead, she chose to block me. She left me right where I need her the most. She chose silence. And I spent three months trying to find a way back to someone who could have simply spoken to me. I can accept that people get angry. I can accept misunderstandings. I can accept that even the closest friendships have difficult moments. But I am still learning to accept that I cannot keep being the only person trying to repair something that belongs to both of us. Maybe I was too attached to the history we shared. Maybe I kept confusing the length of our friendship with the strength of it. Maybe I believed that fourteen years meant we could never become strangers to each other. But I am beginning to understand that a long history cannot replace present-day effort. Memories cannot do the work of communication. And knowing someone since childhood doesn’t automatically mean they will know how to protect the person you have become. I still care about her. That is what makes this so complicated. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be afraid of losing her again. If our fourteen years meant nothing to me, I wouldn’t still be trying to understand how we ended up here. But caring about someone doesn’t mean I have to ignore how their actions affect me. And being someone’s oldest friend doesn’t mean I must always be available, no matter how often I am hurt. I don’t know what will happen to our friendship. I don’t know whether we will eventually find our way back to the way we used to be, or whether we will slowly become two people who share a childhood but no longer share the same closeness. I don’t have an answer for that yet. All I know is that I cannot keep pretending that nothing happened just because we are talking again. Because we are talking. But I am still afraid. I still feel guilty for writing my own feelings. And somewhere inside me, there is a quiet voice reminding me that real friendship should leave room for honesty, disagreements, apologies, and the freedom to speak without constantly fearing abandonment. I don’t want a friendship where I have to wonder how long I am allowed to stay. I don’t want to keep proving that I am a good friend by being available every time someone comes back. And I don’t want to lose myself trying to preserve something simply because it has existed for so long. Sometimes, I think the universe doesn’t give us the people or the endings we ask for. Sometimes, it gives us a pattern and waits for us to understand what it is trying to tell us. And I strongly believe that there are moments when we have to stop asking the universe to return things to the way they were and start listening to what our experiences are teaching us. Maybe this friendship is not over. Maybe it will change. Maybe one day, talking to her won’t make me wonder whether I am about to lose her again. I don’t know. But I do know that I cannot rebuild trust by pretending I was never hurt. She came back after three months. We talk now, almost like nothing ever happened. She still sounds like my best friend. But I am no longer the girl who believed that fourteen years meant someone could never make her feel disposable. And perhaps that is what hurts the most. I didn’t just lose the friendship I thought we had. I lost the innocence with which I trusted it.