I’ve been pining for my friend who I’ve had since 5th grade and it’s one of the things that killed our friendship. In depth, during 7th grade, I made the mistake of telling someone I had a crush on my best friend and was hoping I’d have the gut to tell him. Of course, this didn’t work out because I had problems at home with my parents and they shot down most of my relationships, plus he still was having trouble with his s********. My mom being highly homophobic threatened to tell his parents that he was gay, which she herself was never supposed to find out. This caused him to avoid me in fear of getting outed, and I was left alone for months. When all this went down, I was told I could never speak to him again. Of course, I didn’t listen. He texted me later on, apologizing for abandoning me and leaving me to feel like s***. I forgave him because we had a genuine friendship before, like staying up until ungodly hours on skype or texting about our fears and insecurities. But even after this, we still have a huge gap where our closeness used to be. We started talking again very recently, but in secret because of how much stricter my mom has become since we used to be friends. Not even a week ago we got to hang out the entire day at school and do dumb crap. I noticed that he’s kinda touchy, like when I sat on the bleachers he put his head in my lap, which I totally didn’t mind. Or when we stand together he basically leans into my shoulder and doesn’t seem to notice or care. We also spent half an hour lying in the bleachers listening to music from his phone. He gave me his playlist to listen to and we surprisingly have the same taste in music. After all of this, I feel that same dreaded longing to be close again like I did in 7th grade. When he comes up to talk to me my hands get all clammy and I can’t breathe and my whole body is shaky. It’s so extreme how my body reacts. We don’t live far away from each other and I constantly wish I could just walk to his house and catch up on everything we missed over the long period of separation. I want to have my best friend back. I feel so proud of how far he’s gotten with expressing himself. I remember him being super insecure and wanting to make nobody other than myself knew he liked guys. Now he’s ok with dressing the way he wants to and being around the people he likes. I feel like I have a chance to save what we lost before and maybe figure out a way to either get rid of this pining or talk to him about it. Our relationship may have ended on a bad note, but I hope we can fix it and start over. I really do hope I can make things work out again.
