Best Friends

We’re the best of friends—she lifts me up when I’m down, and I like to be her rock when she feels ready to hit the ground. Our fathers are never around. My mother cannot work because her husband tells her not to. Her mom stays pretty sick because she drinks a ton of alcohol to help deal with the pain her former husband put her through.


My friend’s mother has a brother, who also happens to have a wife. However, her husband decided that it would be a fantastic idea to sleep with his brother-in-laws wife. When my friend’s mother found out about the affair, a divorce was rearranged. It’s hard when you do not work and you’re a single mother to pull through. However, the single charm that keeps the woman going is her daughter.


Over the years, we experience the basics of life: loss of loved ones, childhood memories, divorce, and our first broken hearts. She stands by me and I defend her in any case—whether she’s wrong or right. We play in the woods and jump on the trampoline as children, cry over boys together as young adults, and hug at funerals.


However, one day her mother attempts suicide and my friend goes to stay with her father. She does not want to go, and my mother offers to adopt her—but her father will not hear of it. Although she’s kicking and screaming, they take her from me. My once best friend now represents herself in a more “pure” light; according to her—she believes that this awful wench of an aunt is now her mother, as well as thinks I’m not good enough to associate with her because I have an open mind, and that she needs to find an overrated boyfriend to feel good about herself.


The two of us lose connection, and eventually—her actual mother drinks herself to her own death. At the funeral, I stand by her side and pray incessantly for her and her adopted family. Shortly after the death of her mother, my mother became ill with cancer. She never calls to check on me or my mother, and yet somehow inside—I still love her.