i will always love you.

I wrote this for a personal essay in school.
I’m giving it to her, along with a scrapbook of our lives for Christmas. I don’t mean to upset you, I hope this doesn’t. I love you always.

Best Friendsby Caitlin Nicholson

When I think about my best friend, I hurt inside. It is so hard to believe that what we use
to have was slipping away, we told each other everything, and with time, it became nothing.
Who knew, that with growing up, came growing apart? It didn’t have to be that way, it’s just
the way things turned out, and I know/ I hope that someday things will be the same as they
once were.

Swinging together at Stacey Green Park on Hawley Street is how we met, i’m pretty
sure. Our mothers had been bringing us to the same park for months now, and somehow, we
just connected. We were 3 years old, our birthdays only a month apart, and we were going to
be friends forever. We did everything together: played dress-up, barbies, house, we even
started junior kindergarten together at the same school. We played together in the sandbox
and planned our birthday parties to be fabulous; we learned hopscotch and how to recite our A
B C’s. Now of course, I remember all of the good memories, but the bad ones, not so much. Our
moms told us that we fought all the time; we would argue about little things such as who was
going to be what barbie, who got to wear what dress-up clothes, we would hit each other over
the head with our backpacks and we would fight about whose best friend another friend was. I
guess fighting is what a good friendship is based on; if we can make it through the rough times,
we can make it through anything.

I remember as clear as day what I believed to be the worst day of my life. I walked out
of my house, to go and get my best friend to walk to school and I seen the for sale sign on her
yard, I turned right back around and
went into my house and cried. My best friend was moving away. When my mom finally
convinced me that everything would be okay, I walked out of my house again to get my best
friend to go to school. When I got to her house, only 5 houses down and across the street, she
was crying too. We both believed that there was no way that we could continue being best
friends if we didn’t live close together anymore. Although it was tough at first, we knew that we
were wrong and there was nothing that could ever come between us. We still always talked on
the phone and hung out all the time. We came to that point in our lives where we went to
video dances, talked about boys and experimented with new things. We were closer than ever.

Starting high school without each other was really tough; it was horrible not having your
best friend with you to be just as scared; we started hanging out with new crowds, and
although we kept talking on a regular basis, we stopped hanging out as much as we always had.
Even though we weren’t always around each other, we always wanted to remain best friends; it
just wasn’t a question whether we wanted one another in our lives or not. I guess things change.

When high school first ended, we started to become really close again. We both decided
to take a year off of school, figure things out; we would hang out all time and talk about what
we wanted to do for the rest of our lives. We started working together again, and it became
really difficult. We started getting really sick of each other, and every last thing would get on
the others nerve. We are both stubborn people, and like to get our own way, we really started
to clash. We were changing, growing up; we started realizing that we really had nothing in
common anymore. That’s when we really started hanging out with new people; not involving
the other in our lives. Our friendship really hit rock bottom, we came to a point where working
and other people became a priority. It was hard not having my best friend around anymore,
and although there was always other friends, it could never be the same. I cried all the time; my
whole life I felt so lucky to have a best friend- and now I didn’t have one.

As of right now, things are not the same as they ever were. We talk sometimes, but we
don’t spend time calling each other- updating on our lives; when we see each other, (usually
only at work) things seem to go back to normal, we pick up where we left off. It’s good for a
while, but then things get weird again.
Even though neither of us wanted our differences or our ‘new’ lives to get in the way of
our friendship that has lasted so long, it has. We are not what we use to be, and I don’t think
that it can ever be that way again.

Sixteen years is a long time to be friends with somebody, it’s sad that our time had to be
up. I will always love Sarah, but it just doesn’t work...we are not the same people we once
were.