Question Number 7: We used to be friends

Hallways. High school. 100's of people.

You smile at those that you know and ignore those that you don't.  And what about those that you used to know, but don't know now?

I remember when I was a freshman, so wrapped up in the beginnings of high school and the unknown of whatever might lay ahead. A senior offered to drive me home from school one day, and  on that solitary car ride, we talked about life. We talked about school, we talked about boys, we talked about our futures, and we talked about friends.  She said to me knowingly, "The friends that you have your freshman year will drastically change.  I haven't even spoken to my freshman best friend in 3 years."

I looked at this girl, this 18-year-old girl who had lived only a few years more than I had but had experienced what felt like a life-time more, and I nodded agreeingly.  But inside, I was calling her a liar.  Because I knew that my best friends that I had at that moment, the ones I relied on for everything and went to before anyone else when I needed someone to talk to or spend time with, would always be my best friends.  I would never be this girl, who untangled herself from her freshman friends as she grew older.  I would never be her.

I was wrong.

As I flip through the scrap book I made the summer after freshman year, the one I spent hours sorting through my digital camera and 1000's of memories to create, I can count at least 10 faces of smiling people who I have not had a decent conversation with since the bell rang on the final day of freshman year.  And as much as it pains me to say it, the senior with the knowing glint in her eyes who drove me home from school one day was completely right.  Friends change.  And it really is heart-breaking. 

Yesterday at scool, I walked by a sweeter-than-sugar girl in the hallways who I spent hours on end laughing with last year.  We didn't even smile at each other as we walked by.  So much has changed in one year that it is as if we do not even recognize one another.  It is as if we were never friends.  Were we?

What does it take for a friend to become a stranger?

Some of those friends strangers I miss more than anything.  Some of them I don't, silently wondering how we were ever friends in the first place.  Either way, there was a time when I could have gone to them for anything, told them anything, asked them anything.  And now, I can't even smile at them in the hallways without feeling strange and out of place.  Was it me who changed, or was it them?  Was it time that tore us apart, or was it us? 

I once read a quote that stuck with me forever: "Strangers are just friends waiting to happen."

But what if certain friends are just strangers waiting to happen?