The last time I talked to Kelly, I had no indication it was going to be that. We talked about a mutual friend of ours, Rachel and her incredibly problematic boyfriend. I told her about my first few days in school, we spoke about dating, much like we always did. Nothing changed, except that the morning after she completely disappeared from all my social media platforms. It was as if she'd never existed.
I pinged her again and again on Discord, our social platform of choice. I tried to reach out to her every day, for a few days. Nothing. She was gone.
It's hard to have a friend who is so riddled with issues that from time to time, she just completely drops off the face of the earth. According to her, she has attachment issues, and hates it when I get too close. So I don't get too close. Even though she's my best friend, I act like it means nothing to me that she drops out and in of my life as she pleases, causing an earthquake every time she does. Because she's my best friend, I act like her actions do not affect, even though every word she says weighs heavy in my heart and I trust her more than I do myself.
When I was still studying physics for my A Levels, my tuition teacher taught the concept of electromagnetic induction in a certain way. Electromagnetic induction, he explained, was not cause by the magnetic field itself; rather, it was caused by the change in the magnetic field over time, the magnetic flux. When the class visibly drew a blank, he used the analogy of happiness. A rich person would not be happy simply because they were rich, and a poor person was not sad simply because they were poor; rather, happiness is correlated to the change in one's wealth over time. This was why lottery winners could feel like rockstars and Wall Street bankers leapt off buildings after financial crises.
That seemed like a pretty good explanation for what happened every single time Kelly came and left my life unannounced.
It's funny that I only met her about 8 months after talking to her. I first met her in an interest group on Discord in October 2017. You know the feeling when you look back and think about your decision to start talking to one person that you didn't have to, and wonder how different your life would have been if you hadn't spoken to them in the first place? Just because you have synergy with someone doesn't necessarily mean that you will ever become friends. As university students, we are very well aware that making friends - and keeping them - is an active posture. We have to actively speak to people against the fear that we'll come across as weird to them, we have to arrange to meet with them to keep the spark alive. We also have to make efforts to be as open with them as our fragile little shells will allow us to be.
The act of making friends, therefore, is not just the singular act of walking up to someone and saying “hi”. It is a series of constant small decisions one makes to spend time with another person and to open up to them. It is a slow, gravitational pull, wherein you pull yourself into someone's orbit and hope that they pull themselves into yours. It is hard.
From November 2017 until July 2018, that is exactly what I did. Every single day, without fail, I would open Discord and say hi to her. She is a Singaporean studying in London, which meant that our sleep cycles were hardly aligned. There were only small windows of time in which we could talk to each other without us being tired the next day, and I took them. It took me a long, long time to realize that she was taking them as well. Slowly, we pulled into each others' orbits. The small decisions built up.
To be someone who has lost people is to fear loss. This can be loss in the most literal sense - last September, someone I was closely acquainted with passed away in an accident. At night, I stood vigil over his coffin at his wake. Did you know that when trying to preserve a corpse at low temperature, corpses are prone to leaking blood from their eyes if the cooling fails for even 10 minutes? The image of him, in his military uniform, crying tears of blood has never left my nightmares.
In retrospect, Kelly was never an easy friend to care about. I'm not just talking about the fact that she would disappear from my life every couple weeks, only to reappear and carry on like nothing had happened. I'm talking about the fact that she had issues. Deep-seated issues, which meant that one evening in March I had to figure out how to call an ambulance in London from Singapore because I was scared that I'd lose her. She told me what she planned to do, and it was serious. That was not my first rodeo with the terrible s-word; it was just the first time I wasn't the one involved, and I had no idea what to do. I didn't want to lose her.
The ambulance got there in time, and she texted me in the morning. She told me she'd brought her Pikachu plushie to the ICU with her. She told me I was dumb. I told her I didn't care, I just didn't want to lose her. For those few days, there wasn't much conversation between us; I'd awkwardly check on her, and she'd tell me she was fine. I could feel that she was lying but I didn't press the issue. I was just happy that I hadn't lost my friend. I didn't tell her that every time I texted her at 3am after that it was because I had a nightmare of her crying blood.
The day finally came. I met her for the first time on a hot day in July, when she'd come back to Singapore for her summer break.
For anyone who's had an internet friend who they've found a way to meet in real life, there's an adjustment period, because while you may know everything about the other person, you're not really acquainted with them yet. There's this awkward phase where you and your friend stare at each other, giggle, and crack an inside joke. When the adjustment period is over, you find that your friend is slightly different from what you knew of them online. Maybe the way they speak in real life is different from the way they speak online. Maybe you didn't expect them to be shorter than you by this much. Maybe the way their face animates itself is different from the pristine pictures that they send you. Whatever be the case, these are minor obstacles, and soon it's like you've been friends forever - because, funnily enough, you have. You go shopping with your friend, finding clothes and remembering what their favorite color or, their favorite aesthetic is. You go for dinner together, and recommend each other dishes that you know the other would like. You browse through Sephora and ask them how they did that specific eye on a picture they sent a month ago because, oh my god, it's like, so pretty.
Eventually, you have to say goodbye. As you watch them leave, you pat yourself on the back, and remember every single small thing that you did to bring you to this exact spot. Congratulations, you may say to yourself, on overcoming the final barrier with your best friend. Then you reach home, and you text her over Discord.
"Your message could not be delivered because you don't share a server with the recipient or you disabled direct messages on your shared server, recipient is only accepting direct messages from friends, or you were blocked by the recipient."
She's blocked you again.
The blocking didn't last, and after a couple of weeks she started talking to me again. But the flux was too much for me to handle. Imagine winning $10,000 in the lottery. Now, imagine that after spending $100 on a nice dinner, you lose $50,000. You're now $40,000 in debt. Shortly after that, the bank tells you that it made a mistake, and your debt is erased. You're now back to where you started, but the journey taken to reach that point is so unimaginably stressful.
The dam broke, and every single thought came flooding out at her. I told her about how toxic it was for me, that I had to pretend it meant nothing to me that she blocked me without a word, and came back like nothing had happened, for the sake of her mental well-being. I told her about how worried I always was whenever she left, because she told me that the next time she made an attempt she wouldn't tell me. I told her about the horrible, horrible nightmares, those trippy sequences in which I would be texting her and then suddenly be standing over her coffin, watching as she bled tears of blood.
Silence. Then, she said: "Go forth and be with Rachel."
"Is that how you see it? Like I'm taking sides."
"No, I just think she's healthier for your sanity and you both now have a mutual closeness."
The conversation continued for a while after that but that was probably the moment our friendship died.
At the time of this writing, I have not spoken to Kelly for about 3 months. She dropped off, and never came back. The weirdest thing was how relieved I felt when she was gone. That was how I knew that the friendship was well and truly dead.
Making friends consists of taking small, little decisions every day to try your best to care about them. It's not about one big gesture, like planning a thousand-dollar birthday. It's showing up to drink given 4 hours' notice because they just broke up with their boyfriend of a year. It's about going to their house at 10pm when you know they absolutely need a hug. It's about writing them a birthday card while the two of you are fighting. It's a process unto itself.
To lose a friend, you just need to wake up one day, and make the small decision to give up, and let the wind take control of the kite, because you can no longer hold on anymore. Because this is the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper.
*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.