How to break up with your best friend

An open letter to the only toxic love of my life

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Chip (/tʃɪp/): a small piece of something removed in the course of chopping, cutting, or breaking a hard material.

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It’s almost 2AM when a ghost interrupts my nightly pre-sleep Instagram doomscrolling session. Her familiar eyes stare back at me through the screen of my phone, and the blue lights radiating from her static smile burn my retinas. There’s a boy in the picture next to her. Somehow, he feels familiar, too. I don’t even know his name, but he’s appeared in every single one of her Instagram stories for years, now. On my end of the screen, my boyfriend’s arm tightens around my waist. His mouth finds the bare skin of my back and grazes it in his sleep. I move him gently and get out of bed. I won’t be able to go to sleep until I’ve written all this down.

Chip was my sixth ever best friend. It feels excessive, right? Especially considering that when I first met her I was barely fourteen. I’ve always been deadly jealous of those people who somehow manage to maintain the same close friends they’ve had since kindergarten, as yet another confirmation that I – on the other hand – am condemned to live my life without ever forming any long-lasting, solid, real relationship. It’d be easy to blame it on the foundations of this capitalist and hyper-consumerist society we inherited, where friendships and love stories are made of the same quality of the shoes they sell on SHEIN, designed to disintegrate under your feet after one afternoon of walking. But my relationships have always been more like expensive, on-brand Dr. Martens. My mother has had the same pair since she was sixteen, and she convinced me to get them three years ago because ‘the money is worth it, they’ll last you forever.’ As I write this, that same pair sits in the corner of my room, covered in so many holes that they kinda look like Crocs, and yet I’m incapable of throwing them away because… because. I’m not good at getting rid of things. Shoes or friends.

For five years of high school – which even now, at twenty-two, still feel like three times as much – Chip and I were a symbiotic creature: a two-headed, four-armed, one-hearted, hungry teenager who walked, felt and existed as one. If I needed the bathroom, Chip needed it, too. If she wanted to go to the snack machine, I followed. She’d sit on my lap every recess and I’d let her. Partially because she was barely half as big as me, so her weight didn’t really bother me. Partially because then I could hide behind her shoulders, and she’d have to do all the talking for both of us. Between classes she’d explain equations to me, and in return I’d explain poetry to her. Symbiotic relationships, by definition, occur for the benefit of both parties involved. In this sense, I’m a culprit just as much as she is.

You might think that I’m one of those people who tend to use the term ‘best friend’ with lightness, but that is very much not the case. In the micro-universe of my life, pronouncing the words “best” and “friend” next to each other has always felt like proclaiming something solemn. Launching a spell, invoking in vain the name of the Father. As a writer, I have always given extreme importance to the weight of the words that leave my mouth. As a recidivist weird kid and fat girl, I have always lived in a constant state of awaiting rejection. Therefore, I would have never dared define someone as my best friend if they hadn’t done it first. As the result of generations of divorces and dysfunctional parental relationships (while also bathing in the conviction that I’d never experience true love in the romantic sense) a Best Friend was the highest form of interpersonal relationship I could aspire to. I was trapped in a tower, patiently awaiting for a straight-forward, talkative and outgoing dame in shining armour to come and rescue me. My peer, my soulmate, my life companion.

I still sometimes joke that I’ve always been an introvert who occasionally gets adopted by an extrovert. In insight, I’ve always been so deeply terrified by the idea of being alone that I’ve ended up offering myself as a blank piece of wet clay to the first hands who’d get there. I’d let them plasm me into whatever they needed me to be, stretch me and squeeze me with their fingers. I’d get drunk if they wanted me to be fun. Sober up if they wanted me to look after them. Laugh at their jokes when no one else would, so that the silent room wouldn’t be filled with their embarrassment. I’d force myself into clothes that were never meant to fit me and looked ridiculous and cartoonish on my body, like a kid playing dress up with her mommy’s closet. Trying so hard to be the best friend they wanted me to be. Posing in pictures with them so that they could showcase to the world that they did, indeed, have friends. I always looked like I didn’t belong in those pictures. Like a stock-up figure someone had cut-copied-pasted next to them, but who was clearly too tall, too large, curving down trying desperately to fit into the frame.

We were sitting on the side of a pool once, Chip and I. France, Cote d’Azur, summer 2018. Two years into our symbiosis/friendship. I was drawing a portrait of her in my notebook, sketching as accurately as I could the traits of her eyes, of her smile, of her breast and hips, the mole on her cheek. I barely had to look at her, her presence so familiarly printed on the front lobe of my brain. We were the only two Italians on the poolside, so when I opened my mouth the words flowed out without me needing to worry about people around us thinking I was pathetic.

“Why are you my friend?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” She didn’t look at me.

I told her. I explained that when we’d met, on our first day of school, she used to only hang out with the cool kids. She tried so hard to fit in with them. It had taken her two months to speak to me.

“I don’t know…” I fought so hard to keep my voice from trembling. “I feel like you only want to be friends with pretty people.”

Maybe I was fishing for compliments a little bit. Subconsciously I was probably waiting for her to argue with me, tell me I was just as pretty as the cool friends she had outside of school.

The scene replays in my head like the sequence from a movie. The script written by the cheapest, cheesiest, teeniest of screenwriters. She finally turns her head and lowers her dark sunglasses to the point of her nose, just enough to observe me from over the frame. Her smile is warm, compassionate.

“You are my exception.”

I truly believe that Chip did love me, in her own way. If one day aliens finally come to colonise us and attempt to understand the complex foundations of human relationships, I’ll suggest they look at examples of teen female friendships.

I know that I’m not without fault. I always knew Chip had a strong personality. Terrible temper, slightly self-centred, no filters. Often people asked me how I could be her friend, and I used to find that comforting, in a way. Towards the last months of our friendship, I started referring to her as a “controlling boyfriend.” Which, even now as I write these words, I feel bad about. In her own way, she was showing me she cared about me. But maybe that wasn’t enough anymore.

I’m not gonna go into details of how our symbiosis/friendship ended, because I don’t think it matters and because I think that it would somehow belittle what our whole friendship has been. When people ask me, I simply respond that we ‘grew apart.’ Which is true, in a way. We ended up apart, and just like that I finally had enough space to grow on my own.

I’ve often gone back to think about that day at the pool since our friendship ended. I wrote poetry about it. I’ve considered texting her, just to say “hey, I hope you’re well, just fyi I don’t resent you, and I still love you.” I’m pretty sure she’d love that. She would turn to her new cool friends and her mouth would twitch in a proud smirk. She would take that as an admission of faults, and that is why – in the end – I never pick up the phone. I know this makes me sound bitter. Maybe I am. Because I miss her. Because I feel like whatever issue we had we could have talked it out, if only she weren’t so hot-headed and proud. Because I can’t stand being the villain in the story of her life. Because I hate that I’ll never be that person again. Or because I’m afraid that this – the way our friendship ended – says more about me than it does her.

Chip is the only person to ever break my heart. I have always been very weary of the people I let into my life in the romantic sense, probably because I grew up in a family where everyone hated each other, and I was always very adamant about not letting that happen to me. But I think Chip is (and hopefully will always be) the only toxic love of my life. She’s not the first friend I lose, probably won’t be the last, but the way it ended – in fire, thunder and earthquakes – will always haunt me. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you. I’m sorry you couldn’t fix me. You’ll always remain such an important part of the person I became. I hope, eventually, you’ll stop thinking ill of me.

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It’s been months since I started writing this essay, and it still feels like the least accomplished piece of writing I’ve ever produced. Like every other overthinker, elder daughter and writer on this platform, I always try to turn my feelings into something useful. I throw them on the paper, glue them all together and try to make sense of them. I live in the hope that every bad thing that happens to me can be turned into something worthy and meaningful for my overall existence.

However, this is something I am simply unable to rationalise. Every couple of weeks I come back to this Word document. I re-read the first paragraphs, change some of the wording, add a couple of lines, and then I close it again. I don’t forget about it, though. I keep thinking about it. Obsessively. Looking for a conclusion. Trying to solve the riddle.

I’m afraid this one will remain unsolved. The break from Chip didn’t make me a better person; I didn’t learn anything useful, other than the fact that I have the power to let go of the people who are bad for me. But next to that great thing that our symbiosis/friendship was, it doesn’t seem like enough.

More than everything, I feel lonely.

I still look for her in all the faces around me. I have friends, both old and new. But the old ones remain far, across Europe, in that micro-universe where Chip and I came to be. The new ones, on the other hand, simply cannot fill the void she left. I love them to bits, don’t get me wrong, but there seems to be a thin layer that constantly separates us. They love me, but they don’t need me. They understand poetry without me explaining it to them. They don’t fill my awkward silences, so I have learnt to do it myself. I’m no longer anyone’s exception.

So, this essay doesn’t have a true conclusion. Not in the way every other thing I write does. I need to let it go, put it online and give it a chance to exist away from me. And I need to give myself a chance to open a new Word document and start writing something new. I can’t spend anymore time trying to make a sense of these words. I’ll go insane. And I’m not that person anymore.

So, here it is.

To Chip, with love.

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