"Tis Better to Have Loved and Lost..."

“May had a twin. Our sister April. The two of them were like one soul sharing two bodies. I never saw anything like it. Those two had no separation between them. . .April got deflated about life, I suppose you’d say. It opened her eyes to things she might not have noticed, being so young. She started having stretches when she didn’t want to go to school or do anything. . .she was having terrible depressions, and of course the whole time, whatever she was feeling, May was feeling. And then. . .[April] killed herself. . .something in May died, too. She never was normal after that. It seemed like the world itself became May’s twin sister.”

I never had a real twin sister, but I had a friend that came pretty damn close. People talk about love at first sight all the time, but they never really talk about friends at first sight. Not like causal acquaintances, I mean like BEST FRIENDS. The kind of friends when, after knowing them for a day you feel like you’ve known them your whole life, like you knew them in a past life... Ever had a friend like that? Where you were so close, you felt like you shared a soul? A mind? A heart? I had a friend like that, and I lost her, so once again, reading The Secret Life of Bees, I related to May and my heart broke.

Losing my friend was one of hardest things that ever happened to me. It changed me. It broke me- my heart, and for a few days, my mind too. Thankfully I was able to heal… although scars remain. But it is truly impossible to have a friendship like that and not be altered by it permanently. And though I lost her, and still ache to this day at the thought of her, I would rather have that pain than never have known the joy of her friendship. It is just a testament to how close we were that it hurt so much when she left…

“Love in our life is just too valuable

Oh, to feel for even a second without it

But life without death is just impossible

Oh, to realize something is ending within us

Feeling yourself disintegrate”

-The Flaming Lips