BFF

I don't make friends easily. Actually, I currently only have one friend and Girlfriend only broke through the wall by the narrowest of margins despite my own methods of self-destruction because she is so aggressively friendly she could melt the heart of a snowman.
Everyone else is an acquaintance. There are different levels of acquaintances too; people I've talked to online for years, people at work who I know well enough to have lunch with but never see socially outside the office, people who used to be sorta close but now due to time or circumstance or both have shifted to the world of Periodic Acquaintance. I've been like this my entire adult life preferring to let the world see what I want them to see and keeping the real me closely guarded. Even here, dear reader, where I am more honest then anywhere else, you (obviously) don't really know me. Of course, you could have probably surmised all of this yourselves from how warm & fuzzy my personality is....
Ahem

So it might surprise you to hear that I did indeed once have a BFF. While we didn't live in the same neighborhood, we did attend the same school growing up, which is how we met with our lockers being next to each other one year. We instantly clicked, the way little girls sometimes do, and we were inseparable for years.
We grew up together, made prank calls together, got our periods together, got drunk together, and discovered boys together.

She was always there for me. She consoled me when my mom hated my first boyfriend and again when he broke up with me because I gave bad blowjobs. She covered for me when I wanted to sneak out of my house and didn't hate me when a guy she had a crush on had a crush on me. She walked beside me in high school, teaching me to keep my head held up, while my belly grew larger with my first born.

And I was there for her. I held her when she missed her mom, who died when we were 10, and I held her hand a few years later through the ceremony when her father remarried. I covered for her when she wanted to sneak out of her house and listened to the woes of having a truly evil stepmother. I was the one who teased her about the boy who threw rocks at her because I knew it meant he liked her and I was the one who laughed my ass off a couple years later when they started dating. I was a friend when they conceived a child, chose not to keep it, and she was disowned by her father.

But there is always something, isn't there? that no matter how much two friends love each other...well, nothing lasts forever. I couldn't be there for her that last time. I know in my head that there is nothing differently I could have done but that doesn't stop the guilt or the regret that I couldn't be there when she needed me most.

Instead, I was out on a date with The Paperweight. She was at her boyfriend's house, still dating the rock thrower some 4 years later. He, unbeknown to me, was suffering from a severe depression that caused him to chase her threw the woods behind his house, shooting her repeatedly, then laying down beside her carefully arranged dead body before blowing his brains out.
She was 20 years old.

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I'm sure you've all heard by now about the shooting in the Mall in Omaha. Having heard this morning that the note this man-boy left sited that he wanted fame, I refuse to post his name, a link to an article, or any other information about him or what he did. It is a rarity that I wish I believed in the existence of hell, but this is one such occasion that I do so that he may rot there for eternity.
If you would like to kill yourself, by all means do so. While this will cause great pain to those who love you, who am I to deny what another person chooses to do with his or her life? However, when you cross the line to homicide, you are making that choice for someone else. And that, I can never forgive.