Dear Best Friend

Author: Sneha Manohar

DEAR BEST FRIEND,

How are you? You must be pretty swell, I guess. I mean given your great personality, you must have made a lot of new friends by now and must be really happy with them. Do not ask me why I associated being fine with having friends. I really don’t know why either. Me? I’m faring well. This new life away from you feels odd but I’m managing. Turns out I’m not the best at making friends and to my surprise, I actually feel lonely sometimes. I know I should just pick up the phone and call you or text you. Reaching out to you isn’t really a problem. It’s just that I don’t want to. Why? I really don’t know. Given how long it has been since the last time we had our everlasting talking and laughing session, you must be thinking that I have found new friends and probably don’t need to talk to you anymore. That isn’t the case, like I just said … Not many friends around here.

 I wish you were here with me. College life would have been awesome, that’s for sure. Our parents would have been relieved that we have each other and also be on the edge thinking about what we would do when left together and unsupervised. That said, there are actually so many things we could do here together that would be a lot of great fun. At least two times better than when I did those same things with my new friends here. I wonder if you are liking your new college and if you miss me the way I miss you. Probably not, I mean let’s face it. I’m not the best person to hang out with. 

Sometimes I wonder if your new friends understand you the way I do. If they conveniently like whatever you don’t like to eat and don’t mind eating it off of your plate. If they make you laugh for a long time almost over nothing the way I did. If you now have weird inside jokes that don’t make sense but are still funny for no apparent reason. If people look at you to find the other person just the way people asked you about me, having full faith that you were lying if you said you didn’t know of my whereabouts.

People think I’m extremely close to a few over here and that they are my best friends…I mean they all are good people and I do like them, I do act goofy around them and mess with them and talk to them about a lot of things. But let’s be honest-none of them could replace what we had. People that say staying away from the love of your life is a nightmare certainly do not have their best friends far away from them.

 Maybe, just maybe, you don’t need me anymore. Maybe you found that ‘24*7 always together’ pal. I didn’t. Probably won’t for a long time. That is also probably why this will be just another letter that will never reach you and no one will ever know how I truly feel.

With kind affection,

Your old best friend.