“So much for summer love
And saying ‘us‘
‘Cuz you weren’t mine to lose.
You weren’t mine to lose. No…”
~August
Taylor Swift
Life is amazinggggg.
It gives you all kinds of experiences and prepares you for… I don’t even know what…death? Anyways, let’s just get straight to the point.
I have this thing for dissing people through writings. Ok? I like targeting. So, if it is too evident who this is for…NOT MY PROBLEM. Just deal with it yourself.
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I’M SORRY :”D
Before I tell you what all this is about you must understand the importance of everything mentioned in the title. I’ll break it down for you.
‘From Survival to Revival: ft. (Keep Notes) Ep 1. To feel like a replacement’ talks about two incidents of mine that revolve around the word ‘REPLACE’. While Part.1 talks about being a replacement for someone in someone’s life, what it feels like, how it started, how it ended part 2 talks about the same word but with a different connotation.
This part is going to be more like a storytime. It’s just an incident from the recent past that I felt was one of the things I most vividly remember from 2022. I don’t know if I want to carry it with me to 2023 but I do want to carry the learning and share it with you.
So, I had this friend. We’ll call her using the pronouns SHE and HER.
She and I had known each other since middle school. We did a few school shows and events together and had great camaraderie. Sadly, when we became classmates in freshman year, both of us turned rivals. Actually, she started disliking me for some unsaid reasons. I, already tangled in my own life, didn’t really bother to do something to change that.
A year passed. Slowly, due to her negative attitude toward me, I started averting from her too.
In sophomore, she called me up during the summer break and started talking to me about her feud with her friends. It was a topic on everyone’s lips so it wasn’t news to me. I was honestly, quite stunned by the fact that ‘SHE’ had called me since everyone knew how much she hated me for being…me? I guess?
But I didn’t let it show and comforted her. I had already known about all the problems she was going through and empathized with her because we were both going through the same kind of stuff. Almost the same.
We started talking more often…discussing life. Her friend became friends with me and my friend too. Things turned awesomeeee. We started chatting often…doing challenges…going on friend dates. We did a couple more events together. Everything was great. We created so many memories together, until, of course, the past dived in.
We had both recently lost our best friends. I could empathise with her because I, too, knew what it was like.
Then came something that kills joy, friendships, and all kinds of relationships. False expectations, comparison, and jealousy.
She started expecting me to replace her lost best friend. She didn’t say it until much later but it showed. It was very evident in our conversations. She missed her best friend. I missed my friend too but I never wanted to replace her best friend and would never let her take my lost best friend’s place.
She would mention how the things that we did together were the things that she did before, with her lost friend, and how doing the same things with me gives her deja vu. No conversation would go by without her mentioning her friend’s name. It was all ok with me. I thought it was her period of grief and moving on so I felt, that’s all right. I stuck with her the entire time. Months passed on and everything felt like a movie. It was still working out well for us. It got jinxed pretty soon, though. Not much later did she completely put a full stop to everything.
Our memories, thoughts, the times we laughed and cried and bonded over things, talked about zodiacs and listened to Taylor Swift, it was all about to be a sweet memory.
A couple months back, our group of four friends (her friend, my friend, her, and I ) was having a conversation and suddenly she and I recalled an incident from the past. We were both so excited to talk about it that we started arguing over who’ll go first. I, being the ever-compromising me, said,”You go first…” but what she said next was something I could have never expected
She nodded with pride and said, “Of course, I’ll go first. You are only here to listen to me, anyway.” And if that wasn’t enough, she further added, “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be here. Would you?”. She started laughing until she saw our faces, struck with silence.
I was shattered. Speechless.
After all the times I crushed my own hopes, beliefs, and desires all she gave me was apathy. I felt used. Exploited, actually. I had been betrayed. Again. It happens to me all the time.
And the typical me, like always, blamed herself for that one minute when no one said a thing. They looked at her, then they looked at me, and then the look of shock turned to pity.
My guy best friend, more like my brother, who also, by the way, had a slight crush on her at that time got enraged when she said that but I asked him to stop there. Not with words. With eyes. They said it all.
He didn’t say a thing. No one said anything. I think she realized that she had uttered something wrong. She gave me her most inviting smile ever, which beseeched me to not punch her in the face for saying that.
I went along and said, “haha…go on…tell me what happened next…” I regretted doing that later, but I didn’t know how else to react.
And suddenly, everything was normal again. Everyone started speaking and indulging in the conversation. Only 5 minutes later, the bell rang. Everyone stood up for the day-end prayer. I stood up too. I couldn’t stand for long, though. It was after a very long time that I had felt “weak in the knees” in the literal sense. LOL.
I closed my eyes while the prayer was going on and in my head, I only got flashbacks of everything from the very first day and I said to myself, “It’ll never be the same again”.
All this time, I was being used as a replacement. More like, a rebound. I was giving her that momentary pleasure of experiencing the same things she had experienced with her friend before. I was trying to match up to her expectations thinking that we were something good.
I not only lost a very good friend but also hope. Hope, to ever comfort a grieving heart again.
Well, this was it for the story. We didn’t talk for a couple of days because I’m a human and humans get pissed off, though, I didn’t express it. My guy friend who was already done with this attitude of hers soon broke up with her. She lost her “ranting or hear-me-always device” aka me so she had to run back to her old friends. I hope she’s not treating them the same.
I don’t blame her for what she said. I still believe in kind hearts and people who actually treat other people with love.
I’ve heard, I’m on the list of people she hates. While I did not realise how being on that list is reducing my amount of oxygen intake or stopping my heart from pumping the right amount of blood, I can’t seem to know why I belong there.
Well, when she was asked about why she had talked to me that way in the first place, she called the allegations FALSE so, that’s funny. Anyways, we are on talking terms now. I initiated. Obviously, haha.
It’s not the same though. I’ve heard, she’s leaving school next year. I wish her all the very best and as for me, I’ve got to be careful next time lol.
“To kill someone innocent slowly is what a rebound relationship does. You’re using someone to forget the memories of someone else. You try to unlove someone by pretending to love a different person. It gives you pseudo happiness, satisfies your grieving soul but completely shatters the life of the one who’s trying to give their all to you but watches you never feel that they are doing ‘enough’. “
Put yourself in their shoes and maybe then you’ll know how small instances can scar someone for a lifetime.
Beware of being a replacement. It’s not the best thing to be.
Peace ✌🏻
#DiscoverYou 