Friendship

I bled hatred. Seeing her sprawled out, self-made, helpless, pathetic. Bleeding. Was she? No, I was. I saw the bloody heart on the paper. Her blood? No, mine. Perhaps a mixture. I sat on the bed, my back to her. She’s on the floor. Blood. Drowning? Not quite. Drowned? A long time ago.
We began well. We tied our dysfunction together and made a friendship. Her mother was an abusive drug addict, she herself had bi-polar and a slew of other problems. My thoughts were my abuse, my emotional and physical scars my disorders. We were twelve; small, blonde and blue eyed, innocent in mind, not in experience. But we clung to each other immediately. Weekend sleepovers transformed into 24/7 companionship.
The first year was amazing; we smoked pot for the first time, shed all our other friends, lived side by side. Spending a day apart was virtually unheard of, and our respective families began grocery shopping to accommodate the needs of the friendship, not their individual daughters. On the outside, we were perfect. She was hilarious, I was intelligent. She was hyperactive, I was sporty. Together, we seemed to possess every characteristic of a functioning person. But we were each missing large portions of what makes one human, and what keeps one alive.
I was selfish, close minded. As I type this, I still am. My higher IQ put me above her; if I thought she was wrong, she was WRONG. I listened to her on an analytical basis, relating her problems to my own, the only way I knew how to sympathize. I had too much common sense, thought in ways that transcended the situation. I was done for before I could realize.
She was insane. Mood swings were constant. Crying, hitting, screaming, breaking, destruction. I didn’t expect it, but when it came out, it hit me like a hurricane. She was dependant to the point of violence; she would act out if I chose anything, anyone, in any way, over her. This was a progressive emotion; it was only a small spark at first that developed into a flame I didn’t have the life experience to put out. But what I simply could not wrap my head around was the depth of her dependence; she was in love with me, and I was blind.
High school began on a sour note, infused with petty drug abuse and desperation. I would smoke pot to numb my emotions towards her, she would drink to get away from me. Yet it brought us closer. I wanted to hold her, help her, tell her she didn’t need to do this. Explain to her how much I really, really loved her. But my love didn’t mirror hers; hers was deeper, more true. Mine was stupid, selfish. I was alone and I blamed her. Sure, it was her fault. When we met, I loved big crowds. Parties. People. I adored them, I craved them. She liked solitude, one-on-one. So I chose her over them. In High school, when I looked at my cell phone and saw two numbers, I began to regret it.
So I began creating the rift. It, in all honesty, wasn’t intentional. I held a relationship with a boy; hers fell apart in under two weeks. The more stable I became on the inside, the more unstable she became on the outside. I began feeling helpless. What was once just looks of disappointment when I decided to go with other friends turned into verbal brawls, screaming matches that were never part of my nature. I was quiet and soft spoken, I respected cultures and people. The more we fell apart, the more hateful she became not only towards me, but towards humanity.
I don’t remember when I saw the first cut, but Im pretty sure it was a word. Did I block it out? Maybe. It was “love,” or “hate,” or something of the sort, carved into her arm as if skin was an artistic medium. I closed myself off. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t my fault. This was the media, the books and movies that showed that harming yourself was a natural teenage transition. This was her family, whom she hated perhaps more than she acted like she hated me. This was her, HER fault, HER emotions, HER problems, HER disorders, HER medication, HER refusal to take it. This was in no way me. But I was all of it.
Every once in a while, there’d be more cuts. I never saw her do them, we joked about them. We began drinking, but we were no longer doing it together, for fun. Our interaction changed from drunk escapades in parks to drunk, crying episodes on the phone at 3 in the morning. But I caught myself, my rationality was coming in handy. I was an honors students, all A’s, I couldn’t be doing this. I had the potential to get into Harvard if I put my mind to it. Teachers loved me. My family, first generation immigrants from Russia, depended on me. She spiraled downwards, distanced herself from everything that could have caught her. She was in a learning disability program at school, which lumped her with kids who were facing similar issues. Kids who competed in drugs, who had nothing left and nowhere to go to. She wasn’t one of them when I had her, but soon she became the epitome.
I stopped caring. She was no longer a friend, but simply an annoyance. I would ignore her calls, but the dread I felt when her name popped up on my cell-phone screen was a constant reminder I couldn’t just throw her away. I loved her. I depended on her, perhaps as much as she depended on me. But someone whom I looked up to had become the “what NOT to be” example. And I loathed her for letting little things affect her, never looking in the mirror long enough to spread the hatred to myself.
We stopped talking for a while, but each time I tried to break it off, one of us would come running back to the other. I had a boy, but I was so lonely. I longed to talk to someone who understood me, someone who knew who I used to be and could see the drastic change in what I had become. Someone who had been in contact with the kindness that now seemed to be destroyed by the volatile relationship I had become a prisoner to. Again, it was completely selfish. By having someone recognize the negative changes I had gone through, I was simply trying to convince myself that I was, or at least once was, a better person than she made me feel like.
During these problems, I thought we were growing further apart. From my side, we were. I tried to push her away as far as I could, but I ended up struggling against my own restraints. But while I thought she wanted nothing to do with me, in reality a love was growing. It was sexual; something, at the moment, that I couldn’t understand. I had NOTHING against gay rights, but I was too young to understand that this girl with whom I’ve spend a quarter of my life on earth looked at me and saw more than a support system, more than a friend. I didn’t realize how little jokes, kissing, lap dances, how much of an effect it could have on an unstable mind.
By the end of Freshmen year, I was alerted on her interpretation of our relationship. People I considered friends suddenly saw me as the ultimate bad guy after having the slightest contact with her. To this day, I know I didn’t deserve it. I had wholeheartedly fought for her, and pulled out when I realized it was useless. I couldn’t accept the fact that it wasn’t lies she was spreading; it was as if her reality was a different plot with the same script.

It was a weekend afternoon, one of those terrible days no one wants to file under “Spring.” The sky was gloomy, gray. I found refuge in my boyfriend’s basement; we were lying in the dark, taking a nap. The phone rang and broke the tranquility. Her name flashed across the screen. Nothing new. I ignored it, went back to lassitude and bliss. It rang again, nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t even look over this time; checking wasn’t worth the effort. About 20 minutes later, the phone had rung a third time. Having had nothing much on my mind, seeing as vacation was the following week, I had allowed a bit of guilt to build within me. I didn’t pick up the phone, but I acknowledged it. Suddenly, an unfamiliar ring came from the device; it was a voice mail, something that she seldom left. More out of interest, seeing as part of me lived on drama and fear, I checked the message.
“I’m…sorry.” The way those words were said, I knew something was wrong. My stomach dropped, and I began to shake. She had been threatening suicide for months, but I never expected her to go through it. She was the kind of person who does the opposite of everything she says, no matter how convincing her initial argument may be. But the rasped breathing on the other end projected her pain inside me. I wanted to scream, to cry. I ran out of the house, which was luckily only a block away from hers, with a speed I didn’t know I could attain. As I ran through the unlocked front door of her colonial and sprinted up the stairs to her room, I couldn’t imagine what would await me.
I entered the room as a 14 year old girl. I had blonde hair, blue eyes. I was in good shape, and I got all As. I was smart, quick on my feet, caring and good-willed. I would never see myself as a girl again.

Her bed was in shambles, the blankets piled up and covered in trash. The items she kept on her dresser were strewn on the ground. At first I tried to avoid the body, tried to take in every other possible detail. There was her sketchbook, a dripping heart drawn in fresh red paint. Paint? It had to be paint. In fact, it seemed the paint had exploded. It was on the walls, on the floor, on the bed. But as I allowed my eyes to focus, to see the ghoulishly white figure sprawled on the floor, blood gushing out of the rift in her arm mimicking the depth of our demise, I realized art supplies were not the culprit. This was an emergency.
I walked over to her slowly. Or perhaps I had ran. Time was no longer important, life or death were no longer distinguishable. Should I call the ambulance? No, they’d take her away. She’d have to go into another mental hospital. She’d end up like her mother. So I slapped her face, gently. I yelled her name. I cursed, I shook her, I got that response. “I’m sorry..” she whispered again, but I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to punch her, to kick her, to destroy her and everything that had ever had any connection to her. How could she do this to me?! She wasn’t the victim. I was the victim. I made sure she was alive, and crossed the room, as far away from her as I could get. I sat on the edge of her bed, my back to her. After a few minutes, she had gotten up herself, permeating the room with her struggling gasps. She sat on the bed, parallel to me, but also turned away. “Do you hate me?” She asked in earnest.
I don’t remember my response, but it wasn’t reassuring. I didn’t want to look at her, I didn’t want to let myself cry; I didn’t want her to think I was crying for her. Soon, silence pushed out the tears, and she and I began to sob. We didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect this. I had come to terms that usually, I was crying for me. I was the victim here, wasn’t I? But as I tried to conceal my tears, leaning away from her, I realized I was crying for her. In fact, I WAS her. My heart broke with realization, with the pain she had experienced through me. I didn’t hate her. I loved her. I was in love with her. I wanted to spend every waking moment of my life with her. But I couldn’t. At that moment I knew, nothing I wanted I could ever let myself have. Or else, I was going to end up like her.
Her dad walking through the front door triggered us into a frenzy. I mopped at the blood stain on the hardwood with a shirt, she hit the sketchbook, threw her sheets in the laundry basket, and put on a long-sleeved shirt. I think she had put an arm-warmer around the gash, which obviously needed medical attention, and would have required at least 20 stitches. During this clean up, we made eye contact once. She was pale, ghostly, and by the look in her eyes, I could tell I was too. We silently went down stairs and greeted her dad. He had brought chocolate cake from work, and we sat at the dining room table, joking and devouring the chocolate as if our very lives depended on it. I had never loved anyone more.