The 3 Things That Can Make a Best Friend… and The Three Things That Can Ruin a Best Friendship

              I once thought that the only thing that made a best friend was a common interest, like dancing or jumping rope.. I now know that a friendship, the best kind, is very much like a large building. You have to have a solid foundation with no cracks or weak points, that would be the time you take to get to know the other person. The you slowly build the first floor, walls, ceiling, doorways. Then you move onto the second, third, fourth, etc, floors, building them the same as the first. The floors are every year you’re friends with a person, or every milestone you two overcome together, building up trust and love. When you have finally become completely trusting of the other person and care for them deeply your building is finished. You are then able to add paint, furniture, etc, that would be the little inside jokes or handshakes or whatever that you and your friend share with only each other. But you must be careful, because it can only take one tornado to bring the whole building down.
             Though there are three elements to a best friends, there are also three parts to a situation that can ruin a best friendship. Chelsea and I had been friends since 6th grade, but we had only become close friends our freshman year of high school. I had many other friends and so did she, but we were always together and knew one another better than anyone else. You never had her without me, or me without her. It had seemed like our friendship was stable, safe, impossible to be brought down by anything. We seemed to know each other better than we knew ourselves, we no longer thought of ourselves as best friends, we were sisters. We had never fought and though we had different views on some things we though of ourselves as two halves of one whole person. We trusted each other more than anyone else, we knew every secret about the other person. So as you can probably tell, trust is the very first thing a best friendship needs, without trust you would never be able to let the other person really get to know you and vice versa. So it would stand to reason that trust would also be a factor in the storm that could completely destroy your best friendship. I had thought that Chelsea and I had trusted each other completely, but there are some things that we kept from one another, but I’m not really sure why. So after having though about it a bit, I think it’s because deep down we felt that something was off.
                The second thing that makes a best friendship is acceptance, and the second part to the storm is denial. I’m a Baptist, I have been since I was born, my parents never forced me to attend church, it was just something I wanted to do when I was younger. As I got older I preferred to learn about the bible and Christianity from my grandparents church when we visited them for the summer, and from my family. Chelsea didn’t have any beliefs, she said that she didn’t know if there was a higher power of some sort or not so she wasn’t going to speak against or for religion. We talked about my beliefs sometimes, often just small stuff like what I believe Heaven is like and what one has to do to make it to Heaven instead of Hell. She never made fun of me for my beliefs, and always defended me to people who made fun of my lack of experience. I accepted the fact that she didn’t know what was out there and didn’t really care. But looking back on it now I can tell that in a way, we were sort of in denial about one another’s beliefs since we never discussed it. Sometimes people think that they’ve accepted something about other people so they don’t need to talk about it. But not talking about a something is the same as denying that it’s there.
                 So a best friendship needs trust and acceptance, and the storm needs lack of trust, and denial. That only leaves care, compassion, or love to finish building a best friendship, which means that an uncaring attitude is the finishing touch to the storm. Chelsea and I had always been shoulders to cry on. We were always there to listen to each other whenever we had problems. I cared about the things she did and if she was fighting with her mom or not. It seemed that she cared about me just as much since she was always there to offer words of encouragement whenever I was down and upset. I don’t know if it was just this year, or if she had always been this year, but at the start of our senior year she stopped caring about herself, her friends, and her future. It’s not like she had no ambition, she had been filled with excitement the year before for applying to colleges and getting out of Monson. At first it just seemed as though she no longer cared about her future, but after a while it started to become obvious that she no longer cared about herself as well. Things became tense because of her new attitude and became completely strained when she stopped caring about me and my opinions. So after having built a strong foundation and every floor of the building, it can take only a storm with three elements to collapse the whole structure.
            Friendship is a building, made up of trust, acceptance, and care/compassion. The perfect storm to ruin the whole thing is made up of lack of trust, denial, and an uncaring attitude. So even though I’ve lost a very good friendship, I don’t regret having been friends with Chelsea, nor do I regret still talking to her now. We had some amazing times together, and for several years she was the very best friend I had ever had. I look forward to meeting many new people when I leave for college next. I have no doubt in my mind that I will make new friends next year who have more in common with me than Chelsea did. I will always keep our friendship in mind when I decide whether or not a person is being a good friend to me. I love her and wish her the best but after a storm as strong as ours, it’s impossible for things to go back to normal.