Isn't High School Funny?

High school is filled with shifting friendships. Alliances are made and ended quickly. It is easy to meet a new person, become infatuated, and spend weeks as best friends, inseparable. It is just as easy for a single event or lack thereof to cut friendships apart. In high school, as is typical with teenagers, these cuts are often jagged, ugly. And maybe it does happen all the time but it doesn't make that cut any less painful.

I've experienced the seemingly petty drama of a friendship between two teenage girls falling apart. In my case, it certainly didn't feel petty. It felt awful. To lose your best friend hurts. To end a friendship that had defined the first two years of high school is a painful but surprisingly easy feat.

Sometimes boys come in the way, sometimes other friendships, sometimes family or school. But in my case I never really knew. Not pinpointing the exact reason why Betty (fake name) and I stopped being best friends and became wistful memories and awkward silence was much worse than a good, solid, "You slept with my boyfriend."

Maybe twenty years down the line I will look back on this falling out and laugh at how unnecessarily dramatic high school makes life. But also, maybe just maybe, I will be able to call up Betty and laugh with her about it.

Graduation is a week away. That is why I wrote Betty a Senior Letter. I didn't expect my letter to make a difference but I wanted to graduate having said everything I had wanted to say. Betty and I had ended our friendship abruptly, without discussion. Everything had been left completely unsaid. So I said them in the letter. It's funny how you can say so many things in a letter and not face-to-face. But I've always been better at writing than speaking.

Then, yesterday I received a message of Facebook. It was from Betty.

Now, after all the drama so typical of high school but not any less painful, a week before graduation. Betty and I are speaking again. We have plans to hang out. We have plans to keep in touch when we go to college. One of the first things we said to each other was "I'm sorry! I've missed you." And just like that, funny how it's so easy, we're friends again. Just like nothing had ever happened.

Isn't life, isn't high school, funny?


Reading: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
Still continuing in my Harry Potter summer reading marathon

Listening: Ghost - Laura Marling