When I was eleven or twelve, I was kind of a little in love with my best friend.

Not that I had any idea, of course; I was always really dense about people, and my view of the world was distressingly heteronormative.

So, yeah, I was kind of a bit in love with my best friend, which makes how terrible I was even worse, but I’ll get to that.

Anyway. Like I said, I was always dense when it came to people, and lived totally in the heteronormative zone, so I never had the faintest clue about my feelings until a long time later – not until after I’d graduated school, when I started to realise that no, actually, I was not entirely straight, I liked both sexes (like I said, dense when it comes to people). But with her… I don’t know. We first met when I was not quite four years old, and I don’t remember that, but I do remember being four years old, and the two of us, even then, being best friends and just clicking, being totally on the same wavelength. We were both the sort of people who lead, socially; it didn’t bother us to be the first person to do something, or to do it on our own, but we always  had each other so that was never an issue anyway. If there was a bad idea, we talked the other into it; if there was a good idea, we both plunged into it headfirst, backing each other up like whoah.

I was a weird kid who had trouble with empathy – like, it was there, if you could reach it, but I had trouble with the most basic thing, identifying other people’s feelings with my corresponding feelings. I had this idea that if other people’s feelings were like mine, then I would feel them, like I could feel my own, which was a nice idea but not how things work, and probably stemmed from a slightly confused theory of mind – but even then, when I had trouble connecting with anybody because they were all like aliens to me, I just latched onto her like a kindred spirit in a hostile world. Everyone else was incomprehensible and hostile to me, or so it seemed to me, but she always had my back.

I’ve never been much of a jealous person – possessive yes, about some things, but jealous, no – but I was fanatically jealous about her. When I was seven she used to spend time hanging around with a kid a year below us at school, sometimes, and I hated that kid. Most people my friend didn’t click with, like she did me, but this girl? They were definitely on the same wavelength. I got so jealous that in the end my friend drifted apart from the other girl – which is kind of ironic, because if I’d been more willing to compromise then maybe I could have ended up friends with both of them, but I was so worried about losing my friend to this other girl that unreasoning dislike was all I felt towards someone whom I otherwise probably would have gotten along quite well with. Well, she wasn’t particularly welcoming to me, either, but maybe something could have been worked out anyway. But like all what-ifs, I’ll never know.

All through primary school, we were BFFs. Like, connected at the hip. I had a tendency to circle in around anyone who cut into the time she spent with me, like I was a shark, but she never seemed to mind; most of the other girls she wasn’t that close to anyway. Like, we always knew where each other’s head was, whereas with other people we had to explain things.

She was the only real friend I had, but I didn’t want anyone else; she was kind of my entire world, really. That’s probably what a big part of the problem was.

At the beginning of the year in which I turned eleven, my cat died, which is where the trouble starts. Like I said, I had trouble connecting with people, and I was unfortunate enough to go to school with people who were particularly hard to connect with anyway. Most of the boys were self-entitled, domineering, vicious little thugs; we had at least two sociopaths in my class, I’n not kidding. One of them I once watched shred an insect, limb by limb, without the slightest expression, watching unblinking as it thrashed and made distressed squeaky sounds. Another of them was kicked out of school several years later for relentless bullying; he too was into tormenting animals, although not to the same degree as Expressionless Psychopath.

And the girls – well, there were only nine of us, and the others were all dominated by a manipulative, malicious Queen Bee who used to set everyone against each other for her own amusement and had rigid, unspoken rules about behaviour, dress, and so on; I know of at least three people who changed schools because of her devastating influence. She always had it in for me, because I was oblivious and obstinate to her attempts at social control. As for the other girls – well, away from Queen Bee they could be nice, but they were all into clothes and hair and boys and makeup and romance novels and shit, and that wasn’t me. Not even a little.

So, I was kind of ostracised, except for my best friend, so my cat was an important person in my life, as comical as that sounds. I understood my cat, my cat understood me, and my cat was always there for me when I was upset, and always willing to interact with me. That goes a long way, when you’re as socially isolated as I was. When my cat died, I went into a sort of mad grief, and the only positive kind of interaction I had was with my best friend – my sister was difficult and I was just entering that age where I was always fighting with my parents, and anyway, parental relationships at that age are no substitute for relationships with your peers.

I went back to school, expecting that even though my cat was gone, I would at least have my best friend to support me. It was the only thing that helped me hold on.

The thing is, when girls hit puberty, their relationships change, and over the long summer holidays, my best friend had well and truly entered that phase. She’d hit a developmental spurt, in between the beginning of December and the beginning of January (and of course, I hadn’t, so that didn’t help either), and she’d been re-evaluating our friendship. She’d realised, I guess, that if she was friends with me she was never going to be close friends with anyone else – I was needy and jealous and demanding and obtuse, and my total social ineptitude alienated everybody I came into contact with.

This, I’m all extrapolating. The only thing I actually know is that when I came back from holidays, wanting desperately to die from loneliness, she had at some point made the decision that she no longer wanted to be friends.

I didn’t really know what was going on at first: she was cooler with me, and not as enthused about things, and was spending a lot more time with the other girls than usual. But at the end of her month was her birthday party, and she used that to send an inescabably clear message to me. Even someone as obtuse as I was couldn’t fail to get the gist of it.

She invited me to her party, of course. We were known to all to be best friends, and if she’d just not invited me it would have involved me with a puzzled and hurt expression wanting to know why I wasn’t invited, and all of the other girls wanting to know too, and possibly explaining to me in the most painful way possible. What she wanted was a more gradual, subtle separation; quite possibly, I will readily admit, to spare me the pain of outright rejection as much as anything else, because she was usually never cruel – I think she was only cruel to me because I don’t think she saw any other way to make me let her go. I’d proven again and again how clingy I was.

So, she invited me to her party, and from my perspective things seemed to be going fine for the first hour or so. Then, she decided that we would all play a game.

It was supposed to be a hide and seek type game, right? Everyone would find a hiding spot in the front or back garden, the person who was It would search for them, when everyone found them it would all start over, etc.

I was made It. I’m sure you’re getting an inkling of where this was going.

I did the ‘close your eyes and count’ routine, before  I started searching. My friend had been very clear, the game was taking place outside only.

So I searched. And I searched. I worked my way around the garden half a dozen times, but not a single person could I find. Baffled and confused, and starting to feel that horrible yawning feeling of dread right before it opens up into hurt, I wandered aimlessly, not sure what to do next, and sat down on the swings to try and work out what should happen next while something hard and cold and painful swelled in my chest.

The swingset happened to be facing my best friend’s bedroom window, and I happened to glance up, to see the entire party of little girls, including my friend, pressed gleefully to the window, where they had been watching my bewildered search for the last half-hour.

And I can honestly, truly say, that in that moment my best friend broke my heart.

For the next hour of the party I sat outside in the garden determinedly not crying, until everyone’s parents came to take them home. I think I told my mother; I can’t really remember. I’m pretty sure I told her, because I had to tell someone under the crushing weight of knowing that the sole and single person I could depend on had joined the horde and turned on me.

I remember sitting in the car on the way home, being quiet, and knowing that everything had changed and not knowing when or how – how over the space of a few weeks without contact, my friend had gone from the person who always had my back, who was always kind and trustworthy and the most wonderful person in the world, to doing to me what she had chosen to do that day.  I didn’t know why. I hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, so what could I have done? This wasn’t something I could clumsily apologise for, and hover around unhappily about to convey my sad feelings. I hadn’t done anything, so how could I have suddenly deserved having my heart cut out and stomped on by the one person I was sure would never, ever do that?

That next year was so full of deliberate breaches and painful misunderstandings. I was still kind of nuts from grief, only now it wasn’t just about my cat, it was about my only anchor in this crazy unkind world being torn from me, and my loneliness status being upgraded to ‘completely alone.’ My friend and I still hung around a lot, because it was impossible not to in a class as small as ours, but there was a distance between us that I didn’t understand, and no matter how I tried to bridge it, it never worked.

Sometimes we seemed to be fine – okay, a lot of the time, because there was a reason we were friends in the first place – but the rest of the time I could feel her withdrawing.  I kept trying to reach out her, trying to fix it in my own helpless kind of way, but I didn’t even know what I was trying to fix.

I found out later, that the teachers had a word with her  and told her that I was afraid that I was losing her friendship and needed reassurance; I was always so much more manageable  under her influence, because she was the only one who could ever get through to me, because she was the only one I was willing to change my behaviour for. She was the sane, reasonable voice I didn’t naturally have in my head, and the teachers didn’t want me to go completely off the rails – they could see the state I was already in.

It was kind of hard to fight a teacher tactfully ordering you to be friends with someone, so my friend reluctantly stopped holding me at arms length. But we weren’t the same as we were before, and I knew it.

Later on I found out that one of the other girls, the one other girl who my friend had always really liked, had given her an ultimatium: you’re friends with her, or you’re friends with me. And it was only two years until high school, and I’m sure the thought occurred to her: is this what I really want for the rest of my life? To have only one friend, who takes and takes and never gives back? Who’s embarrassing and stops me being friends with anyone else either because she’s so inappropriate or because she makes people back off? Do I really want to be her babysitter for the rest of my life?

The next year, the one that I turned twelve and our last year of primary school, she was a lot more stand-offish. I was slightly less-broken and more put-together by then, although of course that’s totally relative. And more than ever, the person I’d know since forever was gone, and in her place was a complete stranger that I couldn’t understand, and with whom no matter what I tried I could never get it quite right. Everything I tried was the wrong thing. I would sit in class and stare at her, and wonder what was going so badly wrong, and why neither of us seemed to understand each other any more. She was into the boys and make-up scene by then, with all the Queen Bee clones, all the stuff she’d thought was a little silly or impractical before. And socially, it was like everyone had suddenly ascended to a higher plane of existence, or something, and I was still stuck on the primitive level they’d all graduated from.

And even when we were hanging out together, things still went wrong. I had always borrowed her stuff, and for her birthday that year I spent a giant part of my allowance on some really gorgeous gel-pens, which were the brand new thing everyone had to own, including some of the swirly multi-coloured ones that everyone loved but you could never actually read the ink of. Like everything else, I borrowed them quite a bit, and at one point she teased me that I’d only bought them for her so that I could use them.

“Oh, of course,” I joked back, deadpan. We’d always teased each other back and forth like that, so it never occurred to me that what she was actually looking for, this time, might have been reassurance that this wasn’t the case. In the past, she had always understood when I was just teasing back. It was just how we rolled.

Instead, though, her face flashed with hurt, just for a second, and then she grinned and laughed it off, but it haunted me for ages that she genuinely believed that I’d bought her the pens out of a selfish desire to use them. I’d saved up for weeks to afford a really awesome present she’d like, just because I wanted to see the smile on her face when she saw them, but I didn’t know how to tell her so and in the end I said nothing. There were a thousand instances like that, and I didn’t know how to navigate around them. This newly-sensitive person operated on totally different rules, and there wasn’t that easy camraderie that we’d always had before.

At the same time as I was losing her, I was only just realising how much she meant to me and how much I needed her, like she was part of myself. I’d built my world around her, and when I pictured my future I always imagined the two of us: grown up, married maybe, but I always figured that the two of us would be together. We’d be married and have kids, but our kids would go to the same school and we would see each other every day, and our kids could play over at each other’s houses while we sat and had tea together and talked about our lives, as close as we’d ever been. I never thought much about who I might marry – that person was a blank space I didn’t care about – or our supposed children: the important part of that dream was her. The two of us, together, always, no matter what changed. And then the whole party incident happened and my whole world came tumbling down, and suddenly the comfortable, happy future I’d always envisaged – that I’d always counted on having one day – looked to be replaced by a bleak, lonely one without my favourite person in it.

Instead of letting go graciously, even on the outside, I clung with all the desperate fervour of a heartbroken crazy person.

I started playing ridiculously stupid control games, like playing up in class until the teacher told her to sort me out, and refusing to behave until she sweet-talked or even bribed me into not acting like a total brat – trying to reassure myself (and failing) that she would always be there no matter how difficult I was.

All I wanted was to keep her, and that was the one thing that wasn’t working.

We graduated from primary school that year, and began the next at the same girl’s high school, which all the girls in our class went to. It was the good school that a lot of girls from the local primary schools went to. There were no longer teachers pressuring my friend to stay friends with, and I had a chance at making other friends besides her. So, from the very first day of high school, she cut me completely.

Every time I said hello she ignored me; every time I tried to talk to her she brushed me off.

At this point I had hair that was just long enough to sit on, if I wasn’t careful (it was forever being shut in doors) and which my friend had been trying for years to convince me to have cut shorter. It wasn’t my only reason for doing so, but when I had half my hair cut off, until it sat just below my shoulder blades, it was partly in the hope that this would get her speaking to me again, considering how vehemently she had always pressed me to cut my hair.

Monday morning I approached.

“Hey,” I said, with a bright smile. “Look, I cut my hair.”

She gave it a cursory look.

“Nice,” she said dismissively, and turned back to her friends, instantly continuing the conversation. My smile fell, and I walked away.

I’m ashamed to say, that in one final, wild attempt to have her at least talk to me, or failing that, to make her feel bad like I did, I nicely asked a mutual sort-of-friend to give her a note, asking why she’d been avoiding me and was it because she felt guilty – and if so then she should.

As nasty notes go, it wasn’t exactly right up there on the list; but considering how many years she’d been a good, loyal friend when I was selfish and demanding and kind of terrible sometimes, it makes me very ashamed now. I’m grateful, these days, that she stuck with me as long as she did.

I finally gave up my attempts to win her back, and over time I stopped crying every night, and moved on and tried to make friends with other people. It hurt, knowing that most people didn’t even know that we’d ever been friends. It hurt, knowing that I was so completely cut out of her life that we didn’t even count as acquaintances any more. We were just two people who went to school together – and that was all. It was like all those years of shared history and loyalty and ridiculous adventures – all the times we’d told each other the deepest, most heartfelt secrets we had – had simply never happened. Even if all I’d been able to do was hang around on the edges, maybe getting to talk to her sometimes, that would have been better than where I was now. Every dream I ever had, had held her, and now… I was in a world where we didn’t even speak to one another.

For years, I wished, now and then, that there was a way I could wriggle back into some kind of relationship with her, no matter how slight. I was trying very hard by then to never ever act at all like a crazy stalker; I had finally started to understand why she had behaved as she did, years too late, and after everything I’d put her through I mostly just wanted her to be happy. But there was an empty place in my heart that was never filled, and when I happened to pass her in the hallways, and see her smile, or laugh… I missed her so hard it hurt.

In grade 10, at the end of the year, after basically two years of ignoring each other, I gathered up my nerve to approach her when she was alone, and to thank her for having been my friend for all those years. She laughed, looking utterly surprised, but smiled and thanked me – and I think that she was pleased, to know that I finally appreciated everything that I had for so long taken for granted.

I saw her at the grade 12 formal, the year we graduated, and she looked lovely, but when I looked at her she also looked like an entirely different person. She’d grown up from the twelve year old girl that I’d known so well, once, and it helped, a little, that she didn’t look like that person any more. She was a totally different person, just like I was by now; and looking at her, it was easier to tell myself that she wasn’t the person that I had known and lost so long ago. She was beautiful and gorgeous and charming, and I had no doubt that if we both started over then we would have been moderately good friends – nothing like the intense, strangling friendship we’d had before – but I didn’t know her, not any more, and so maybe it was okay that I lived in a world where we hadn’t been friends for a long time. I was always going to love her, and I was always going to mourn the loss of the most wonderful thing I’d ever known, but… I could tuck her away in my heart and stop wondering, perhaps, what my life would be like now if things had gone differently.

I don’t know what she’s like now; we’re Facebook friends, like everyone who went to school together, but we never talk or anything. Our lives are wildly different, from everything I’ve seen; when I looked at her smile in one of her photos it made something in my heart catch, and made me feel wistful – a faint echo of what might have been – but then I closed the tab and went on with my life, hoping that she was happy, but otherwise, letting her drift from my mind.