Bridge to Gooblegazia
A Galentine's Day letter to an ex-best friend 💕
Happy almost Valentine’s Day!
For the last two years, I’ve used February to write about the lost love of my life: my ex-best friend. Why stop the tradition now?
The heart wants what it wants, and today it wants to reopen old wounds and cry into Super Bowl nachos.
In the wise words of Usher, “Yeah.”
*Below is a re-edited version of last year’s essay. If you’re missing someone today, this is for you*
Bridge to Gooblegazia
For fifteen years, we were inseparable.
We took the bus together each morning, slept over every weekend, had matching Heelys (the green and white ones, duh), and transformed from tiny kindergarteners to teens to roommates.
You were more than a sister. You were a second self.
…Not that I ever would have told you that.
As close as we were, we never were that sentimental. I don’t think we ever told each other “I love you.” It was, for the most part, implied.
We also understood that we had two families. Your mom taught me not to sleep with my hair up, your little brother’s artwork is hung in my mom’s house, and your dad’s eccentricities are still embedded in my music taste.
Despite spending more time, sharing more secrets, and going through more life milestones with you than anyone else, I haven’t seen you in over a decade.
When I get nostalgic, I try to remember what drew us together in the first place.
I have early memories of us both wanting to be lions in a game of make-believe (quite possibly a game of house. Why wouldn’t lions be part of the household???).
We always wanted to sit near each other in class, though I don’t remember ever actually talking.
My first substantial memory of you is from a birthday party in your parent’s old place. I gave you a copy of The Day My Butt Went Psycho (a classic piece of literature). You laughed so hard you fell over, and I remember thinking that I knew you better than everyone else.
I loved that feeling.
After that, I always shared my favourite things with you. We read the same books, watched the same movies, and listened to the same set of headphones on the way to school.
Over time, we started creating our own stories. We drew maps for an imaginary world, called it Gooblegazia, and hid it from everyone else. Why would we need them when we had each other?
There is a straight line from all of my current interests to the afternoons we spent under your loft bed (that you saved up for with your allowance) dreaming up worlds and crafting narratives. I still catch myself finding shows (Pen15) and books (When We Lost Our Heads) that you’d love, only to remember that I don’t actually know you anymore.
I remember the smell of your family’s laundry detergent, the gap in your teeth, and your childhood home phone number, but I don’t know what you do for work.
Every day, we inch closer and closer to the tipping point where my adult friends(and husband) will have known me longer than you did.
What a scary thought.
Like lots of young, female friendships, we were equally as obsessed with each other as we were competitive.
As we aged, I became convinced that you were prettier, more creative, and more interesting than me. It didn’t help that you knew cool music and cool movies and cool video games and always were reading something that was also probably cool.
I was always paranoid about being left behind. I often felt like you had a whole other life without me, but that I was nothing without you.
It was my worst fear come true when you didn’t tell me about your first kiss. I found out months later during a game of truth or dare with a bunch of other (non-best) friends.
“It wasn’t a big deal” you assured me, “just some boy at camp.”
As if a kiss could ever not be a big deal. As if there would ever be a boy in my life that you wouldn’t have known about.
I pretended to be happy for you, but I was bitter. Bitter that you hadn’t told me. Bitter that you could be so nonchalant about something that felt like some far-off elusive thing that would never ever in a million years happen to me because what boy would ever want to kiss me?
That bitterness flared up throughout our friendship.
I felt obligated to have my own secrets so that I wouldn’t be too clingy.
I was jealous when boys liked you instead of me.
When we got tattoos for our 16th birthdays, you did yours by yourself. You were born a month earlier - almost exactly - and it made sense, you said, to do it right away. I was angry that you had stolen the novelty of being the first kid in school with a tattoo. Somehow being born 36 days your junior made me feel a thousand times lesser.
Real life was so much harder to navigate than our made-up worlds, and neither of us had the words to support each other.
I remember sneaking out and holding hands as we walked through the suburbs at night. I cried to you about breakups and my chronic pain and my shitty biological father and my thighs. I remember you crying too, but it’s harder for me to remember what you told me.
Teenagers are too self-absorbed to be good friends.
In university, that caught up with us.
I came out of my shell and you retreated into yours. While I was out partying, you were with your boyfriend in our apartment. I hated how much he was there just as much as you hated how much I was gone.
At some point, we lost our secret best friend language. We crossed the bridge out of Goobelgazia and entered our adult lives as strangers.
The way most friendships die is depressingly simple: it’s not that anything happens to either of you. It’s that things stop happening between you.
The slow de-prioritization from someone who used to be your closest confidant is devastating.
When you finally moved out of our apartment, you took a chunk of my history with you. At the time, I didn’t grieve you the way the loss deserved. I limited my heartbreak to flippant explanations of "We don’t really talk anymore,” and “I’m not sure what happened.”
I don’t know how I ever pretended it didn’t hurt.
Even now that we’ve been apart for ten years, my new friends all know your name. It’s impossible to remove you from me because you bore witness to everything that made me who I am. We are key narrators for each other’s youth.
I will forever be jealous of those who’ve held onto their childhood friends. Women love flaunting long-lasting friendships like handbags.
How often have you heard a bridesmaid prattle on and on and on about “that one time they promised never to share” or sobbing/giggling/stumbling through a bad retelling “that night. YOU KNOW THE ONE” and thought of me?
In grade five I told you that, for my maid of honour speech, I would silently plug in a toaster and literally “make a toast.”
I’ll never forget that joke, not only because it’s comedic gold, but because I wrote it down year after year after year so I would be sure to do it.
I still remember, but now it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes I get paranoid that our failed relationship is proof that I will always be a bad friend. Michelle Ruiz articulates this same sentiment in her article for Vogue:
That our love for one another has survived decades, distance, politics, sickness, and plenty of problematic men feels like an achievement… But if keeping a friend is an achievement, is losing a friend a failure?
If it is, then you and I both failed. Maybe we are forever linked, not just through our childhoods, but by our breakup, too. We are both marked by an inability to uphold the basic tenets of being a Best Friend Forever.
Not that we ever expect people to end up with their high school sweethearts. The standards for romantic relationships are much more lenient. Breakups are part of life. There is nothing inherently wrong with growing apart from someone you used to love.
Like with all my exes, I eventually healed.
As more and more life milestones come and go - weddings, grey hairs, first homes - I think about you more and more. Now that the pain is gone, I’m curious about who you’ve become.
Do you think the childhood us would like the adult us?
Are we anything like them?
Would you like the friends I have now?
Would you like my husband?
Would you like the person I am now?
Do you ever think about me this much?
If I never said it then, I hope you know that I love you.
For all the messiest parts of our love story, there was always so much laughter and imagination. You are the best friend that got away, and the standard to which I hold every new female friend I make. One day I hope we get to reminisce on all of this together - to fill in the blanks with hindsight and empathy for who we were as kids.
Until then, I hope you have a love-filled Galentine’s Day.
Wherever you are.
Hanging Thoughts:
Have you ever lost a friend?
Are you celebrating Galentine’s? Valentines? The Super Bowl?
What are the odds my ex-bestie reads this? Do I come off okay?