Can a friend in need be a friend indeed?

Due to the lack of exposure to loneliness, I saw myself clinging to the temporary presence of the people around me. I do miss her wide eyes, but now more than ever, I am grateful for the distance between us - this peaceful loneliness - one wherein I am no longer, my greatest enemy. 

Thrown through the stranger doors of 7th grade, during an ongoing pandemic in a stranger country, I was greeted by closed cameras and the blurry, angry haze of adolescence. After being subjected to social isolation, the longing within me to make friends was fierce. Naive and lost - I was shut out by friends that weren’t mine; those unresponded texts mocked my isolation. It seemed to be all my fault. Detached and silent I became, my days were red - consistently angry with this permanent ache in my throat. I hated everything about myself. I avoided mirrors, showered in the dark and surrounded myself with anyone other than myself. Anything to escape my mind and this consistent overthinking - my greatest critic. 

That’s when I met her. With wild, curly hair and wide eyes. Odd, aloof, but a friend. At this cold age of 13, where I yearned for belonging, she was my warmth, my sun. I was no longer alone, it was no longer loud. We’d stay up till 3AM - inseparable, we were. I clung onto her presence with every inch of my soul - terrified of the return of that aching feeling of loneliness, terrified of my own company. 

Soon, the pandemic was over. A new norm of masks and constant sanitisation - we ached for touch, we ached for life. We ached for anything other than that segregating screen that ironically, kept us all connected. 

Now together, I noticed her scent - indescribable. This putrid, grim yet minty smell - it followed her. Over the course of the next few months, we were alone - but this time together. Isolated, we lived in conceded silence - completely submerged, engulfed by the sheer presence of one another. Nothing else mattered. 

Then, one day, she pulled up her sleeve. Crimson barcodes, she was only 13. She told me about the bees in her head, and the constant buzzing. She’d grown thinner, wrists daintier than ever. With every passing day, she seemed to disappear a little more. The thought of her gone left me trembling at night. Soon, these thoughts buzzed and stung; she never told me that these bees were contagious. They followed me, day and night. I analyzed her every move - forcing myself in, to understand just a little more. I’d hug her a little longer, anything to keep her around for more. I couldn’t bear the potential emptiness if she were to leave, I couldn’t bear my own presence. Suddenly, I spent more and more nights under the dim glow of the bathroom lamp, with a blade over my wrist. I began to crumble at the sadistic mercy of my own being. 

Being with her made it worse, I knew it did. I wanted the attention - begged for sympathy. I wanted someone to see I’m not okay - to be completely and clumsily consumed by my presence, to drive themselves insane with the thought of me gone. I wanted to matter to someone, the same way she mattered to me. I saw myself deteriorate, I was only 13. Faced by this loud dilemma, I chose her presence alongside committing to the destruction of my being; anything to escape that feeling of empty. 

Then, one morning I woke up to a missed call and a text saying, “I love you”. I was alone for the second time ever, she was the weakest she’d ever been. At first, we talked each day over zoom. I’d see life, the color slowly returning to a once gray, fraying face. Then suddenly, these calls began to reduce, less regular until one day we stopped talking. We didn’t speak until a year later. Unrecognizable, her face more full. 

She was my escape from a reality I could not face. Until it hit me, once and for all - all at once - silencing the bees, I heard the birds, felt the wind. I saw myself, felt my skin - no longer scarred.