Distance Between Friends

I silenced notifications and stopped responding to “goodnight” texts. I didn’t go out or invite friends to my house. I did everything I could to put distance between us and it worked. It worked. This is what I wanted. So why does it feel so bad? Why when I think of friends do I get unbearably sad and yearn for simpler times? I thought I was supposed to feel that nice uncaring and bitter type of happiness that one feels when you have no friends and simply don’t care. You’re having fun with just me, myself, and I.

I distanced myself because you all made me feel bad. I distanced myself so that I could escape. Either silently or have you ask why I haven’t been talking in the group chat or responding to individual texts so I can tell you exactly what you’ve done to me. Tell you how when you went home from the Spring Social happy, I went home wondering why my friends didn’t like me enough to invite me to their birthday party or have me in front of the camera.

But you don’t seem to care at all. I remember a time before we started the goodnight texts and I was feeling down. So I hadn’t texted in the group chat all weekend.

At school, on Monday you asked me if everything was okay because you’d noticed how I hadn’t been texting as usual. But now when I haven’t texted in weeks and up until now I’d given the driest, barest responses to your cheery goodnights. You don’t seem to care at all. Not publicly or privately.

It’s not like I can tell you about this though. After all, you already have a lot of struggles in your life you’re dealing with. And if I were to even imply that you’re a bad friend it would surely send you into a self-deprecating meltdown. Then in an effort to get advice, you’d talk about me confronting you to your friends and all they would see is me making you cry. Because while they’re my friends too, we both know I’ve always been the lurker of the group and you’ve always been the star of the show. So to make you feel better they’d tell you how wrong I was for saying such things and making you feel bad. They’d tell you to cut me off and jokingly offer to beat me up for you. I’d be the one you guys talk bad about at sleepovers for fun while you halfheartedly tell them to stop being mean.

Public enemy number one.

All because I confronted you about how you were making me feel.

So I’m distancing myself from you.

This way I have no friends.

But it’s better to have no friends than many enemies.