Blinding Lights

I knew two things about you the day we became best friends. The first was that you only liked red and purple Skittles. You had a pack at lunch and poured the orange, yellow, and green ones into my hands after they’d been picked through, only because I was sitting nearby, and all I had for lunch was a tuna fish sandwich. I stared at the candies cupped in my palms long enough for the colors to begin leaching into my sweaty skin. It was hot that day. Hot enough to cook an egg on a roof, as my dad likes to say.

The second thing I knew was that you were a mystery. No one in our second-grade class knew quite what to make of a girl who picked up spiders with her bare hands and seemed unfazed by punishments and snapped crayons on purpose just to try and get a clean break. There was more to you too, but in my seven-year-old eyes, these were the most shocking things.

“Aren’t you going to eat them?” you asked me, staring at the Skittles still in my palms.

I think that if you hadn’t spoken, they would’ve melted together into one big sticky Skittle pancake. I was so struck by the offering that I would’ve ruined it. But you reminded me to eat them, and I did, oneby-one.

You were the only other kid in our class who sat alone at lunch. There was no overlap in our Skittles preferences; we could split a pack with no argument. At our age, that was enough reason for an inseparable friendship.

We grew older. The mystery unraveled slowly and then all at once. I’d thought you were fearless, and in some ways, you were. Every roller coaster meant a laugh; none of them were high enough in the sky. Insects were friends, not foes. The dark was fun to dance in. But really, you were just afraid of all of the big things and none of the little ones. We were opposites that way. I screamed at spiders but couldn’t fathom loss enough to fear it.

You were always the bolder one. People wondered why a girl like you, who talked back to anyone and everyone, would be friends with a wallflower like me. But really, when it was just the two of us, I was the chatterbox. It made perfect sense to us. You trusted me with your silence, and I trusted you with my words.

We were thirteen when the last pieces of your mystery shattered. All at once with seven words. Lying in the dark on my floor, you whispered, “Everyone hates me, don’t they? Don’t they?”

And then I knew everything. I finally understood who you were. There’s no way to truly go back from something like that. You can never look at a person the same way again after you know them to their core.

I don’t remember what I said. Probably something stupid, like “Of course not.” But I remember what I was thinking: it didn’t really matter if everyone else hated you, because I loved you enough to make up the difference.

When you started to slip, I almost wasn’t surprised. Almost. I’d always known you weren’t the easily-satisfied kind of person, and I didn’t mind, because for a while I was enough. But our friendship was like a boulder, unmovable, unshakable, until the day it wasn’t.

The first crack was my fault. After that, every new splinter was a joint effort, a chisel in each of our hands, but I’ll never forgive myself for that first crack.

You wanted more. You wanted more than me, other people to share laughs and secrets with. And I knew, deep down, that you weren’t leaving me. You were just expanding your attention, the lens of your scope having focused on one star for far too long. There was a whole galaxy out there. I was a dim little star in comparison, and I was no longer enough.

But I spiraled. It had always been just us. How was I supposed to share you, just like that? How could you wander away from everything we had?

“You’re just trying to prove that you can be liked,” I said. I wanted to snatch the words out of the air the moment I saw the look in your eyes. Because I was right. And sometimes I think you strayed only because I knew every part of you, including the ones you hated.

After that, I knew we could never fully go back. Words can be apologized for, and even forgiven, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be forgotten. Every time you looked at me, I saw my words reflected in your eyes. It didn’t take long for everything else to crumble. Our friendship had been inseparable for so many years, and now that one crack had been formed, the rest of our little, bottled-up grievances could spill out.

You called me clingy. I recounted every time that you’d skipped class and left me stranded to do a group project alone. You told me that sometimes you didn’t even know what to do with all my words, and I said the same for your silence. Our last texts were sent, the last pack of Skittles shared. I don’t remember what the last words we ever spoke to each other were. Probably a mumbled “See you later.”

Now, two years later, when I catch sight of you in the hallway, our eyes meet, then slide away. My chest aches for a moment because I want to know if you are the same girl, or if I am remembering an old, changed version. I know that in some ways, I’ve also changed. I’m hardly afraid of spiders anymore. But still, I want to share a pack of Skittles with you and tell you how you taught me to fear loss.