Dramatis Personae
Anna Azalea: my former best friend who shared the same sort of resentment as me towards everyone we know. She became a recluse in February 2022 and I last heard from her in September of that year
Myself: the second recluse. a copycat, if you will
Like many of my stories, this is not interesting, yet it's something I still frequently think of and get emotional about. If anything, this is an odd sort of love letter in the form of a story.
I'm a person who can't seem to keep friends for one reason or another, but the people I find myself getting close to I'm probably better without. With Miss Anna Azalea, she was someone I should've copied the life of because she just seemed like she had everything figured out. She's someone I should envy, but my envy comes with malice, and I could never hate her. She was just like me personality-wise, but did all the right things to live a better life in spite of it all. When she became a recluse, she used the extra time to fix all the other issues in her life, while when I did it everything went all wrong.
In the past five years, she's one of the only people I remember actually laughing with. Our friendship lasted for about a year and a half, and it was the sort of friendship where we hated everyone except for each other and were the only people we could divulge our actual thoughts to. We were unapologetically vicious behind everyone's back, saw the same therapist, and had the same mental illness. Maybe it's not good to have a dynamic where we're constantly so bitter, but it was just so fun because I could never share it with anyone else.
In January 2022 she slowly started missing more and more days of school and stopped showing up for good in February. I think having to get through the days without seeing her is what caused the worst spiral in my life. I rarely showed up in March and ended up quitting by April 6th. The last time we saw each other was April 23, 2022. We sat in her car and I confessed that I started taking painkillers recreationally, drinking stolen liquor when I had previously acted like I was above doing something like that, and how I was cutting myself more than ever and tried to give myself cosmetic surgery. I just remember her saying "You need to tell your parents", which felt like such an odd thing to hear from her considering our similarly strict parents who we kept everything from.
Just like how she hated everyone, there's a chance she might've hated me too. But she was the type to cut off everyone she didn't like, and I might've been the last one to go in that same way. She was always a lot more tact about ending friendships than I was. The last few months of our friendship consisted of more gossiping about people we no longer really knew and constantly planning to meet up before she'd cancel. One of the only times she didn't cancel, I ended up doing it because I had taken too many pills the previous night and physically couldn't do anything the next day. Sometimes I regret that and think maybe everything would have worked out fine if I just did it with my awful headache and fatigue and sensitivity to light. We eventually just stopped talking at the end of 2022, no actual dramatic fallout or anything.
So, Miss Azalea, if you're reading this, I want you to know that I really miss our friendship, if we ever talk again we might have lots to catch up on and complain about just like we used to. I wish we could see each other again but I'm living all the way on the east coast now. Thanks for driving me home when I was too lazy to get my license.