an apology to my bsf for being a cunt

addressing and breaking patterns

i have known S for ten years now. a decade of memories, of growing up and growing apart, of distance measured not just in miles but in missed calls and late-night texts. we met at 7th grade lunch. she ate my lunch. without asking. i think that sums her up pretty well. bold, unapologetic, a little bit of a menace. i suppose this friendship began with a kind of bullying. but then again, all great stories need a dramatic start.

we have changed since then. changed in ways we never expected, never planned. she is in goa now, living by the beach, basking in sunsets. i am in bangalore, surrounded by traffic and deadlines. still, we meet. we make time. to reminisce about the past, to laugh about the things that once made us cry, to bond over new wounds that life so generously hands out.

everyone in her university knows me. aditi – s’s best friend. a title she’s given me so often that it’s almost become an identity. because s is the kind of person who sees people, really sees them, and when she loves someone, she does it loudly. she probably sat you down too, told you stories about me. how i almost killed her when we stole her brother’s two-wheeler and took off on an adventure. we barely made it a kilometer before we almost crashed into - well, nothing. she swears it was a near-death experience. she is dramatic like that. i love that about her. with her, everything is life and death, do or die, all or nothing. it makes things feel more important than they are.

maybe that’s why you think she can’t live without me. you’re not wrong. she calls me every other day. we talk about everything. my life, my boyfriend, my long nights, her fleeting crushes, her existential crises. sometimes, her friends call me for advice. after all, i am s’s oldest friend. i must know best.

but it’s strange, isn’t it? how all my friends know her, yet they don’t really know her. to them, she is just a name, a label – my best friend. no further context. no anecdotes. no stories. just a fact. my boyfriend knows better, of course. he understands. he has seen the chaos we have left behind, the adventures that turned into nightmares, the moments that turned into inside jokes that no one else will ever fully grasp. he knows she matters.

but for everyone else, she exists only in passing mentions, if at all. none of them follow her on instagram. while hers have me on their close friends.

maybe it started when i was a kid who never let anyone borrow my favorite books. i would let them sit on my shelf, their spines unbroken, their pages crisp, too afraid that if i handed them to someone else, they’d come back bent, creased, or worse—never come back at all. maybe s is my favorite book. one i’ve read a hundred times, know by heart, but keep close, just for myself. not because i don’t want to share her, but because some stories are too precious to be passed around.

i hope one day, when life slows down and we are not running in different directions, i will talk about her more. maybe i will tell the stories, the real ones, not just the half-truths i offer in passing. maybe i will stop guarding her like a secret and let the world see her the way i do.

or maybe, it will happen naturally, like all the best things do. like the way she first sat down next to me and stole my lunch, like the way we built a decade of memories out of stolen time. maybe one day, someone will mention her name, and instead of holding back, i will smile and say, oh, you have to hear this one. and just like that, she will no longer be a secret—just a part of the story, as she was always meant to be.