We stopped talking a while back.
I still can’t decide if that’s a good thing.

It was a hopeless friendship, ephemeral and doomed from the day it started. She and I took the same bus home. She sat next to me in Art class. Reluctantly she became my friend. I tried to be nice to her, I honestly tried. But her views were either too different from or indifferent to my own. After the first few days there wasn’t anything left to talk about. We would then sit in vague silence punctured only by the blaring from her Ipod.

I never asked her what music she was listening to.
I never really cared.

Apparently one of her popular friends hated me. Or thought I was too much a nerd to be associated with. Or maybe she just never liked me. Either way after a month or so, we stopped sitting together on the bus. We ended even the quiet illusion of friendship. The next year we took different honors and we haven’t spoken since.

Now when I greet her politely in the hallway,
She gives me a sour look as if it’s my fault she’s going to be late to math.

We were never really part of each other’s worlds. The brief moments in the forgotten afternoons that we pretended to be friends would soon be eclipsed by the hectic days of a stressing high school career. There would be better friends and more interesting acquaintances to meet.

And when I think about it now,
It doesn’t seem to bother me too much anymore.

I never really liked her anyway.

Friends change as the years go on. One year they’ll be almost like sisters and the next they’ll avoid even eye contact in the halls. It’s a varying fluctuation through the years. But most of the time I know they’ll always be within reach. Some day, they’ll get back in touch. With her, however, it was as if I was simply looking in on someone else’s ocean.

But, for the record, while we were perched atop the capsized friendship vessel, it was nice while it lasted…

And even better when the tide washed it away.