Parting Ways

           Alex and I were inseparable from the day that we met. Living just around the corner from me, we had play-dates about every day. I would jog over to her house or her to mine. We were born into our relationship. Our parents became friends when my older sister, Amanda, and Alex’s older brother, Taylor, started hanging out. Together, Alex and I created a fantasy world of imagination and wonder. She understood my creative energy, even as a young child. We wrote plays, rolled in the grass, played dress up, house, Barbie’s, and laughed till our sides hurt.

When it came to school though, we were complete strangers. Her shy personality made making friends and keeping up socially very difficult. I, on the other hand, found it quite natural. Gradually we moved into distinctive groups of girls, and away from one another while in school. However, this did not have a huge impact on our close relationship outside of class. Instead of getting upset, we kind of accepted this divergence, not mad or upset that we made other friends. We still shared so much, and our past sealed our bond through this separation. On the weekends, we would eat lunch at each other’s house and horse around just like the old days.

It wasn’t until 5^th grade that everything really began to change. I vividly remember the day that she told me she was going to transfer to a private school in the neighboring district. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. Alex always struggled in school, needing more personal attention and a slower pace. She never seemed too involved in her group friends, always a bit disconnected from the others. Nothing really kept her at the school anymore. We took different courses, hardly saw one another during the school day, and never played together during recess or lunch. Yet I was shocked. Looking back I remember being hurt. It was not so much that I would no longer share a school with her any more, but more so that I had a weird sense everything was changing.

I was right. Slowly, as she settled into her new school life, we began to see one another less and less. Every time we were supposed to meet up, one of us would cancel because of a sudden conflict. Our lives were traveling down individual paths that no longer connected along the way. Once in a while we would chat on the phone, but even that seemed awkward and foreign, like speaking to someone from a completely different planet. While it hurt us both, we let it happen. It was inevitable.