'They Only Start to Miss You When They Fail to Replace You' - Witt Lowry

6th August 2019

To those who are no longer with me,

Story time. I had this friend, this girl that for eleven years, I considered my best friend. A year ago yesterday however, we stopped talking. She was ‘over this friendship’ and I simply said goodbye. Now, I will be the first to throw my hands up and admit that in 2013 maybe 2014, I was a really crappy, terrible friend. I was awful. I did something that involved the guy she liked and it hurt her. We got past it, moved on, everything was hunky-dory. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to June 2018. My best friend of eleven years has come across from Cardiff to Boston to see me. Which makes a huge change as I was the one to do the travelling in this friendship. She had just broken up with her boyfriend after finding out he had been cheating on her a few times. So, she needed what every girl needs after a breakup, a night out with her best friend. The only reason that night out happened in Boston is because she couldn’t run into her ex here. If there was any way of knowing that he wouldn’t be in Cardiff, I guarantee you, it would have been me on a coach for seven hours and no her.

So anyway, she comes down to spend the week with me. There isn’t an awful lot to do in Boston which was always her reason for not coming to visit me and me having to visit her. Then the night out arrives. Everything is great. We’re getting ready in my room. She is making me the strongest drinks ever and by the time we leave, I am feeling incredibly tipsy, if not ever so slightly drunk. You know, when you’re on that ledge and you just know that one more drink will tip you over the edge. We walk into town. The whole way there she I being incredibly loud, shouting, swearing as we walk and it is pretty late, the latest we’ve ever been out. So, naturally I ask her to keep it down. Her response? ‘I don’t care, I don’t live here.’ No, but I do, so shut up, thank you very much.

Now, a brief touch on a backstory. There are only really a few places in Boston for a night out. The Club I used to work at, which was so close to closing permanently, they had maybe 10 people in on a Saturday night. Or the cocktail bar/club place that was the competitor of where I used to work, therefore, I had never been there before.

The cocktail bar it was! So that is where we go. I meet up with this guy she basically forced me to meet up with, and although that added to my crap night, it’s not actually relevant to this story. Anyway, we’re in the cocktail place, we get a drink, squeeze our way around the place. We’re like sardines in a can. I don’t like it. I don’t tell her this because this is her night, its all about her, it is what she needs, so, like the good friend I consider myself to be, I stick it out. That’s when she decided to leave me with this guy that I do not know and wander off. Apparently to request a song.

Something you should know about me. I cannot deal with club like vibes. The music, the lights, the smoke, the packed spaces. Nope. No thank you. I need space, I need to be able to move without getting an elbow to the boob or a drink spilt down my back. Everything that this cocktail bar was, was everything that I hated. Everything that I couldn’t cope with.

Eventually I track my friend down again. I have to follow her around for a bit because it is too loud for me to shout and too packed for me to squeeze through and tap her on the shoulder. I follow her to the toilet where I wait for her outside and then try and grab her attention when she comes out but she completely blanks me, so yet again I’m back to following her trying to play catch up but people keep getting in my way and I really, really, really do not like it in here.

Finally we are reunited and she is really pissed off at me and I’m not entirely sure why so I try to talk to her about it but we can’t really heat each other because again, it is so loud so I suggest to her that we go outside so we can talk and that is when my best friend of eleven years loses it. She starts screaming at me in the middle of this club/cocktail bar and I really cannot take it so I turn around to walk away and she shoved me so hard that I am on a collision course with a door frame, my purse has gone flying out of my hand and I’m trying to recover my footing and the slight drunkenness of me is not helping. Well, thank you Mr Doorman for catching me and picking up my purse for me. Another doorman is reaching for my friend and I suddenly find myself defending her and telling the man that its okay, she’s my friend, we’re fine, she didn’t mean it. He doesn’t care, we’re no longer welcome. First time being kicked out of a place, thank you very much.

When we get outside, I realise that her shoving me was just the beginning of her assault. While walking the thirty paces from the door of the cocktail bar to the market place, my best friend of eleven years starts slapping and punching and kicking me. If I was stood still, she would be beating me up. What am I talking about, she was beating me up. No matter how much I pleaded with her she would not stop. So, I did the only logical thing I could think of and called my dad to come and get us. Even while on hysterically on the phone with my dad, she didn’t stop her assault.

After dad agreed to come and get us, ignoring mums shouts to call the police, my best friend of eleven years finally stopped assaulted me. Only to resume shouting and screaming at me. I was looking into the face of a girl I did not recognise, I told her that, and that just made things worse. She called me a s**t friend if I didn’t even know who was stood before me. She was accusing me of being the one to have just cheated on her boyfriend and she came at me again. So, I said it wasn’t me, I did not just cheat on you with, lets call him Nigel. That is when she said she wasn’t talking about Nigel, she was talking about Brian, they guy from 5 years ago. Then she stormed off down a dead-end ally and then my dad arrived and then we had to herd her into the car like a cow.

By the time we had gotten home, we had been out for the grand total of an hour.

She was sleeping on a mattress on my bedroom floor while I was in my single bed, which is exactly the same as when I stopped at her house. That night however, I slept on the sofa because I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as her.

How odd that on the night my best friend of eleven years beats me up, she ends up with the comfort of sleeping in a bedroom?

The next day she didn’t speak to anyone and she tried to hide in my room all day. Mum wasn’t having any of that. After lunch I went to take my bedding back upstairs, of course she was back in my room already. So, I sat on my bed and waited. I was waiting for the apology that I so rightly deserved. We sat there in my room, in silence for an hour before I asked her whether or not we were going to talk about this and she shook her head: no.

The only time she ever apologised was two minutes after than when I told her that she needed to. I can’t believe that I had to actually tell her that she needed to apologise.

She went home the next day.

Four days after that my nan died and I told her over messenger. She didn’t seem to care and conversation with her were never really the same. She would still go out drinking with her Cardiff friends and tells me about it, which bugged me to no end because I could not for the life of me figure out how she was still able to go out and get drunk after what had happened. I haven’t had a drink since.

August 5^th 2018. I break. She is once again telling me about her drunken antics and I tell her that I don’t want to know and I then unknowingly start the argument that ends our friendship.

Yes, I may have done something crappy with a guy she liked five years ago, but she remained my friend, I told her at the time that she didn’t have to, it was her choice to stay. I spent five years apologising for it, I spent five years making up for it as best as I could. In those five years I never insulted her by trying to defend my actions. In those five years I sat back, took it and apologised again every time she through it in my face. For five years, I realise now, she treated me like garage. Then, when she physically assaults me, for something I did five years ago, and I take a little bit longer to get over it than she would have liked, I once again, become the bad guy.

No. not happening. I don’t deserve that. So, when she told me ‘I think I’m pretty much over our friendship to be honest.’ I replied with two little words. Two words that I will forever be grateful I said.

‘Bye then.’

A year later and I remember reading something somewhere a couple of months ago that said ‘They only start to miss you when they fail to replace you,’ and I could not agree more. In this last year I have not once missed the girl that was my best friend for eleven years, because I have been blessed by meeting some of the most amazing people I have ever met.

My life is now filled with more love, friendship wise, than it ever has before. I used to think that you had one sole best friend and that was it. I was so very wrong. I now have five beautiful best friends who each bring their own individual sparkle to my life and they make up one whole network of love and I am the happiest I have ever been before.

When people die, you miss them because they are irreplaceable. When you leave a toxic and one-sided friendship, you don’t miss the person you left behind because you replace it with a network of support and love.

The torment I felt when I only got to see my ex-best friend once a year who lived two-hundred and twenty-six miles away from me, is nothing, nothing compared to the torment I feel over the fact that the five points in the star this is my life, are spread so far away from me, the torment I feel when I think about how long it has been, or will be, until I see those I replaced her with.

So, that is what you've missed.
Love, always
Tiffany Jade 
Xo