Personal Narrative: A Loss In Hindsight

A Loss in Hindsight

The event of losing something is not a unique experience. Whether the loss was temporary and painless, or permanent and punishing, everyone has lost something. Knowing this, it is unsurprising that grief and loss have been broken down into stages that can be clearly seen in most cases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The fact that my own life is riddled with several varying falls into the pits of despair is also to be expected. Right now, in my sixteen years of life, I cannot count the amount of things I have lost. However, there is one loss I recall quite clearly, the loss of my first best friend.

I met this girl in the second grade. She sat in the seat behind me and not only did the two of us refuse to hand in our homework, we both had three teal monkey-head erasers stacked

on the end of our pencils. In other words, we instantly became best friends, and for the next three years, we were inseparable. While the strength of our relationship earned us a fair amount of taunts regarding our sexuality, that strength also provided us the means to ignore the opinion of our surrounding classmates. It was only in the May of fifth grade that an issue began to emerge between us.
At the end of fifth grade, my friend came to me with a cheesy love letter.

I read the letter, even if I cringed visibly at the curly handwriting, and excessive amount of hearts used. I calmly told her that this was a horrible idea. The next day, I saw a boy find the pink envelope in his desk. I also witnessed him burst into laughter, while showing the letter off to his friends. At that moment, in a rush of disappointment, anger, and fear, I dramatically slammed my hand on the desk in front of him, and told him if my friend cried he would be “hanged, drawn, and quartered.” In the end, he accepted my friend’s feelings and in June I left the Americas for Ireland. I had a relaxing vacation free from any sort of electronics, so when I turned my phone back on at Kennedy airport, I was surprised to find sixty unread messages from my friend. She had, apparently, broken up with the boy a week after I left. And the whole incident was, apparently, my doing. The boy, after finding out I left the country, told her about my threat. They broke up and she blew up my inbox, calling me an obsessive “lesbian,” who was constantly trying to sabotage her chances with

men.
My mind denied the loss instantly. The last week of my summer break consisted of me perusing the messages, now almost two months old, and reassuring myself that everything would be fine on the first day of school. I believed that she was given enough time to cool down, and that this event would not be enough to destroy something that had defined our lives for the past four years. Unfortunately, we were placed in separate classes, and I saw very little of her for the first month of school. Eventually though, the perpetual loneliness drove me to cornering her at a recess period. I demanded we talk, but she told me there was nothing to talk about. She had already chosen another “BFF.” It was over.
That brought me into the stage of anger and absolute rage. In this state I made several regretful and juvenile decisions. For three months, I began to persistently harass my former friend and her new “BFF.” I would specifically go for headshots in dodge ball, even if they put me on the bench. I would aggressively taunt them on their looks and grades. Now, I do not recall my objective in doing this, but I can only guess that it was to make their lives miserable. It was no wonder that everyone else in our friend group branded me the “villain”. I accepted this label for a while, but the solitude was quickly turning to emptiness.
The bargaining stage in this case overlapped with the anger stage and provided transition into the stage after it. The agreements I offered were mostly with God. Although I was not Catholic when this happened, in the middle of the night, while I thought about and regretted everything I had done over the past year, the things I told to no one in particular sounded like empty promises to a god of some sort. I made ridiculous vows to open several homeless shelters and donate all my money to charity once I turned eighteen, if somehow everyone in my life could forget about the past few months. Eventually, these promises ceased, as did my desire to bully the two girls. Neither was helping, I realized. I also concluded nothing could help. I decided that I had destroyed my life. It was, indeed, over.
The depression phase lasted the longest. I stopped talking to people in school altogether, becoming the girl who quietly sat in the corner at lunch. Outside of school though, I began to grow violent. I would sometimes get into fights, both minor and serious, with a group of kids I played manhunt with on weekends. I was not friendly with most of these kids, but the few kids I was on good terms with diagnosed me with “anger-management issues.” I also gained about 20 pounds over the following summer from excessive eating. I seemed to be following a downward spiral, one that would sometimes plummet to contemplating self-harm.
Acceptance, however, came when Hurricane Sandy hit the October of my seventh grade year and I received a taste of real tragedy. As water flooded the streets and fires raged on my neighborhood, everything finally was put into perspective. When school resumed a month after the hit, I apologized to the two girls. Although I never reestablished my friendship with any of the people from middle school, I was able to graduate and enter high school without regret or hanging animosity between my old classmates.