The Life and Death of a Friendship

This is a difficult topic similar to losing a family member but with a different perspective. Friendships are part of your life. You make friends that come and go as you grow up. I started making them at the age of 2 years old when I was enrolled into a deaf preschool program that let us start early before any other regular programs. I had several friends that I grew up with from that age til high school. Then some of them started to go other paths in their paths: college, getting married and having kids young, and working. I went to college and met several more people along the way. Some of them were interesting people and others were well, crazy. Unfortunately, I lost two friends who died while I was in college and it was real sad because I never got to know them more if we did end up being good friends til old age. I did have a few childhood best friends that lasted 20 years or less and recently in the past few years, I lost them because we had changed and didn't spend as much time together as we used to. I learned that life happens and you can't expect people to be around forever. Then there were frenemies (friend/enemies) who were quite a challenge for me and I would constantly have a love/hate relationship with those kind of people. I experienced a couple of friendships that were very toxic to me because of how they treated me or made me bad about myself and yet, I still found myself glued to them. It took me a long time to unstick myself from them. Their betrayal and cruel actions opened my eyes and I realized that it would be unhealthy to continue being friends with them so I had to end them. My mom always tells me that I will have at least 1-3 close friends in my life. Well right now, I feel like I have maybe 1 or 2, but that seems to be going down slowly to one. I had one friend who I considered as one of the bestest close friend ever. We were like sisters and talked all the time via texting or emails. I confided in her about anything and we shared life advices. We had almost everything in common. It was an almost perfect friendship. Then one day, it changed forever when we got into a fight that pretty much ended our friendship. I cried so hard and that was the most heartbreaking thing to go through since the death of my friend years ago. I don't want to mention what the cause of the fight was but it was awful and I still feel guilty about it. I tried to fix it by apologizing thru emails but she distanced herself from me and told me not to talk to her again. It hurt me real bad and it was hard to let that friendship go. So I distanced myself and never spoke to her again til one day she was in town visiting and invited me to come see her. I was reluctant to go see her because I still had those hurt feelings hidden but I told myself to suck up and go. When we did meet up, I was glad to see her but at the same time, it was awkward. I even had to keep a happy face on when I really wanted to cry and hug her which didn't happen. Thank goodness. I would've looked like a fool. We talked as if nothing happened and then I had to leave. She gave me a hug and bid me goodbye. It didn't feel the same as it did once. Then I left feeling like crap afterwards and wondered why we didn't bother to fix this. I felt like it was really over between us. Since that day, I had moved on and occasionally, I will still look at her Facebook page and hope she's doing alright. We still haven't spoken and I miss her terribly. There's nothing I can do about it now. I tried to talk and apologize but she never spoke to me again. So it feels like I'm grieving over the death of a great friendship and I don't know how to get over it. If you think I'm being a crybaby about this, then don't bother talking to me. You should understand that friends are like family to me and I cherish them so much that it hurts when I lose one of them. It takes me some time to heal and move on with my life but I'll never forget those people that came and went. They left footprints in my heart that I will never remove for as long as I live.