In the sixth grade, my group of girlfriends developed the mercurial habit of waging cold wars against one another. 

On any given day, five of us would shun an unsuspected sixth for no substantive reason whatsoever (something about Katie copying Tara’s Grateful Dead bear T-shirt?). 

The unlucky one was abruptly boxed out of recess huddles and lunchtime gossip. Wielding our power unnecessarily seemed like the natural order of things. 

Still, when my luck ran out and the clique targeted me, it stung. 

I slunk into a bathroom stall during one of those lonely lunches, staring down at my clogs like a clichéd after-school special.

Valerie was the first to apologise, proffering a pair of dangling silver earrings as a peace offering in the waiting room of our dance studio. 

At least a full head shorter than most of the others, Valerie (not her real name) was lovably known as the runt of the group—the pocket-size top of the cheerleading pyramid. But in this act of reconciliation, Val made herself bigger than the rest: She broke from the hive mind. She acted on her own. It wasn’t characteristic of Val, the baby of a family that coddled her. She cried in the middle of the night at sleepovers, preferring the comfort and safety of her own home. But Valerie was brave on my behalf. I still remember that.

I can recall no meet-cute, however, just that Valerie and I were as thick as thieves from elementary school through high school graduation. My boldness and Val’s sweetness swirled into a yin-yang. She softened me, and I like to think I coaxed her out of her shell, but in many ways, we were alike: two hairy late bloomers who bleached their moustaches in tandem (a ritual that forges the most intimate of bonds). 

We were completely ourselves and utterly at ease with each other, which I still consider one of the truest gifts of friendship. Val’s big house and big family provided a trove of elder siblings’ high school yearbooks and sorority photo albums, paving the way for our own exciting future. Because her siblings were older, she was often permitted to bring me along as her plus-one, a surrogate sister at water parks and college visits. Having no sisters, I relished the role. On one road trip, her parents told me about the University of Virginia, a beautiful school they said they could see me attending. Years later, I did.

Boys—“guys,” as we whispered about them with an air of importance—never posed a problem between Valerie and me. Of course, we had our crushes and listened to Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One” and talked about them, but we were more like a couple ourselves, sleeping head-to-foot in her tiny bedroom or Val scooping peanut butter into my ice cream, a habit of her family’s, which felt mouthwateringly novel to me. It’s strange, then, to consider that a guy (a man?) drove a wedge between us later, in early adulthood.

To be clear, it wasn’t a love triangle. How can I tell our story, as I remember it, without airing too much of theirs? I could say that I didn’t believe he treated her right. I could say that she forgave him, but I didn’t. Val and I tried to hang on to each other, but her relationship with him lasted, and our friendship didn’t. Our rift wasn’t just ours: The ties between Val and the rest of our group frayed and eventually severed too. Writing that sounds so sixth grade, except that this time, no one abruptly shunned Val—it was more complicated than that—and our reasons weren’t arbitrary.

Some might call it a “friend breakup,” an acknowledgment that friendships, like romances, can fracture. Personally, the term makes me cringe. It equates Valerie with some guy I dated for three months in high school, driving around to nowhere in his parents’ 4Runner. On the contrary, Val and I outlasted all of those trivial boys…until one wasn’t so trivial anymore. That was the beauty of us. The only way I can describe it is: I lost her.

I lost a friend, and I’m fortunate that that is an anomaly for me. I have a group of lifelong friends, who had been Val’s too. (Yes, some of those same cafeteria bitches remain my oldest and dearest—blame the drama on 12-year-old hormones.) Our sisterhood is a source of pride and wonder for us. That our love for one another has survived decades, distance, politics, sickness and plenty of problematic men feels like an achievement. I treasure—and tend to even congratulate myself—on enduring bonds with college and mom friends, too, as if it’s a virtue.

But if keeping a friend is an achievement, is losing a friend a failure? Valerie’s, mine, or both of ours? (Did a man come between us, I wonder, or did we let him?) Romantic relationships are ephemeral, but friends aren’t supposed to be. For years, if anyone asked, I would have held fast to my personal reasons for falling out with Val. 

For the most part, I still would, but age breeds empathy. Like Val, I have been stubbornly in love. I, too, have ignored the advice and the feelings of well-meaning friends and done precisely what I wanted to do. Shouldn’t I have known, since the day she extended me an olive branch in sixth grade, that Valerie wasn’t scared to break from the rest of the group, for better or for worse?

Valerie and I haven’t been friends for a long time. We haven’t known each other as women in our mid-20s, or mothers and wives in our 30s who are now nearing 40. I wonder if parts of her would still be knowable to me. Is that person still in there, the one with whom I meticulously trimmed my arm hair and nestled into bed at night? I never bump into her when I go home, but I know what I would say if I did: I’d tell her that I still sometimes scoop peanut butter into my ice cream, and it’s delicious.

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Source: New York Post