waking up in the morning and looking at the bare walls, once adorned with their smiling face.
reaching for your phone to invite them to a new movie that they would absolutely love to watch, but realizing the last conversation in your messages with them was four months ago, and even then, it was polite and strained.
no one tells you how to cope with losing a friend.
there's overwhelming advice on how to get over a lost lover.
everyone tells you to binge ice cream and romcoms, they tell you that the best way to drown out your loss is to drown yourself in one-night stands and alcohol, they tell you that the pain will soon heal and you'll be with your new other half soon enough, once you cut your hair and start your life over.
but when you lose a friend, there's rarely a dramatic fight that ends with one person in tears on one side of the door, and the other punching the other side of the wall. there's no calling things off and agreeing to see other people with the secret knowledge that you'll find your way back to each other.
there's talking on the phone ever day, and then every few days, and watching those days turn into weeks and months while the silence between you turns into radio static.
you remember their birthdays and why they shut everyone out on every June 26th and what their dad's laugh sounds like and what they no longer hide under their mattress and what their favorite Halloween candy is.
and you don't know what to do with all this knowledge, since you can't just tell them that "I still remember which skeletons in your closet you have still hiding in there, and which ones I helped you dispose of. I still remember your favorite childhood memory and which arcade game you're still determined to beat. I still remember the night you broke up with Emily and how I helped you paintball her house in a fit of petty rage."
you cradled the memories in your head until you pack them away tight, like the stuffed animal they left at your house one day and never asked about again, and the dream journal you two created when you were 9, and the anklet they asked you to fix and never got around to fixing.
you grew up with each other in your hearts, but the space inside never grew along with you both. so as you grew up, you broke each others' hearts.
... so how do you cope with losing a friend?
do you visit their favorite places whenever they're preoccupied just so you don't have to run into them and stumble through awkward, stilted conversation, and follow the same routine as they did whenever they visited those museums or parks? you run your hands along the spines of the mystery and science fiction books they used to buy in large quantities and pick up a book they used to love, but remembering that they're no longer in your life, you pay for it and annotate it until it's full of bittersweet notes and you tuck it away to never be seen again.
do you clear your head of everything they left behind in your mind and throw yourself into your existing friendships? you may keenly feel the loss of one friend, but you still have other friends that are feeling the loss of friendship, so you can mend their wounds while they help heal yours, through late night campfires and early morning jogs. if your old friend was part of your friend group, just know you aren't the only one suffering and you can heal your wounds all together. you can only staunch your bleeding for so long until you become too weak to fend for yourself, so let others help you out in your time of healing and you'll feel inclined to do the same for them.
do you start to meet new people through book clubs and yoga and immerse yourself in the worlds that are now new to you, and slowly come to accept that you're becoming fast friends with them already? you learn some of their secrets during late-night conversations, and grow platonically intimate through nights of strip poker and days of acoustic concerts. there will always be more opportunities to lose those friends but there will always be opportunities to make more, and that's just the beauty of life. your friends will remember all you bared and they will miss you when you leave their lives, but you had the mutual joy of meeting a kindred spirit, and the building blocks of friendship and the finished product that forms the shape of a long-term friend will always be more powerful than the loss.
slowly, the pain of losing your close friend dulls until it's just a familiar but rare ache in your chest that only appears when you think you see them in a crowd but they've already gone, or when you think you hear their name in someone else's conversation but it was just someone else. you no longer have a ruined mood when you hear the song they loved to play in the car, and your hand falls back to your side when you see a comic book they would have loved to read.
you'll lose friends and you'll make them, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. you can't force someone to fit in your life when the shape of your hearts no longer align with the spaces you previously occupied inside. they smoothed out their jagged edges and you had to cut off some of your own. everyone is part of one giant puzzle, and it's hard to find people you match up with, but you'll enjoy the time you have with the people you meet, because everyone is always changing and for everyone that steps out of your life, there will be someone else that fits in perfectly with the space the other friend couldn't quite fill.
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