Young Writers Society

Whenever I have tried to trace back to a point where I could have prevented it all from happening, I’ve never been successful. ‘It all’, of course, being the tattered friendship that once existed between my two best friends. Everything is different now, and I don’t know if I should be happy or sad about that. I feel like I should have done something, anything, to prevent the aforementioned ‘it all’ from happening. But I know I couldn’t have done that, even if I had known what was going to transpire. I couldn’t have stopped the accident, I couldn’t have stopped Lucy from walking around the corner to see her cousin sprawled on the pavement, I couldn’t have stopped Alicia’s insensitivity and I couldn’t have stopped the vicious clash of heartache and poorly timed laughter tearing a chasm between my two friends.

I couldn’t have stopped any of that, but I feel like I should have.

It was never my fight, but somehow it seems to have affected me more than anyone else. If I’m honest with myself, I suppose that a split between Lucy and Alicia was bound to happen anyway. Their friendship had been problematic for long before the accident. Now, every little issue that existed between them has been magnified, although I haven’t actually seen or heard a conversation between them in weeks. I think they are both tired of arguing, but the anger is buried so deep that they still can’t meet each other’s eyes. I wonder whether the original reason for their falling out is even relevant anymore. This unbearable cycle of shouting matches, spreading malevolent rumours and deathly silences has been going on for what feels like forever. Sometimes I think that in the midst of it all, the original causes have become clouded, if not forgotten completely. I know that Lucy still hasn’t forgiven Alicia for laughing at the wrong moment, and I know that Alicia still resents Lucy for her explosive reaction, but I wonder whether in the aftermath of that first argument, so many fights and disagreements have followed that the original reasons are just another excuse.

I knew Lucy’s cousin. She was kind and charming, and the last thing she would have wanted was for her death to have sparked the destruction of a fairly longstanding friendship. Years of both their lives seem to count for nothing. A predominately happy history obliterated because of one foul swoop of fate. I want so, so badly to fix everything, to make things go back to the way they were. That isn’t to say that there weren’t cracks in their friendship before the accident. Looking back, sometimes it seems obvious that a split would eventually happen. For the last couple of years, Lucy and Alicia haven’t been able to understand each other’s meaning. Lucy often takes Alicia’s jokes to heart, or rather, she took them to heart. Everything about their friendship belongs in the past tense now. The exact reason that the split in their friendship came to be was their inability to communicate. I know that Alicia never meant to be laughing at a funny story at the moment Lucy began to cry, but what I was able to see didn’t change the fact that they did not sit on the same wavelength. If only they had understood each other’s minds better.

If only the world could be healed with ‘if only’.

I don’t know where I stand anymore. Alicia and Lucy finally seem to have transitioned from miscommunication to no communication, but I’m still caught in the middle. Their falling-out still plagues me, and I still lose sleep wondering whether I should still try to heal the rift between them. To do that, I would have to know where to begin, and I am not so naïve as to think that the accident alone caused this to happen. Perhaps it is all for the best. They have both managed to slot into groups with friends that seem better able to understand them. Nothing is the same anymore, and I doubt it will ever be the same again.

I still wish I could change that.