Abandonment

        Not many people know about my past because I see no point in telling it, but my sin involves a person who I cared deeply about. I used to have a friend, Emily, who meant the world to me, I loved her like a sister. We had known each other since we were two years old and our friendship lasted through my many moves whether it was across town or halfway across the country. She knew all my secrets and I kept hers happily. Though as we grew up our different upbringings had begun to show. I’m a girl who’s shy and likes reading and art and she likes death metal and piercings. Our differences had always caused many fights between us that often ended in tears, but they also brought us closer and taught us to go out of our comfort zone and try new things.

         I moved back to Oklahoma when I was 14 and we were still as close as ever but I had noticed differences in her, physically and mentally. Emily had always been the outgoing one, the one who loved and craved attention while I was content with being in the background, but since the beginning of the summer when she visited me she had changed. She was seeing a therapist who claimed she now has social anxiety and ADHD all while being depressed. My Emily, the girl who would run around the mall singing at the top of her lungs, the girl who forced me to dress up and pose in store windows with her and walk up to strangers on dares, had depression to the extent that her therapist had her on two different antidepressants and sleeping pills.

        Apparently she had started cutting while I was in Georgia and she decided to tell me that summer. She said she didn’t want me to worry and I was so far away that there was no point in telling me, but I had seen the scars when we were swimming one day so there was no other option. She said she was so sad that when she cut the physical pain made the emotional all go away and although she was ashamed of it she couldn’t stop. I was the only one who knew and she begged me not to tell our parents. Looking back I wish I had but I’m not sure if anything would have been different. The pills ended up making her feel more numb rather than less depressed so she used them more and her friends all did drugs so she was surrounded by forces that I couldn’t control.

       She got hooked, and she couldn’t stop. After a year the drugs and the cutting got worse and the more I tried to help the farther away she would push me. So I stopped nagging at her. I couldn’t watch her slowly kill herself while I did nothing, so I told her either she needed to shape up and stop or I was going to leave. I left.

       We haven’t talked in a year and half. She’s still cutting and doing drugs, and I still can’t bare to watch her do it. Her mom knows and has a therapist pushing pills at her, insisting that they’ll help, and she went to rehab for a couple weeks then left. I guess the point of my story is that my sin, though justified, was leaving her. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I know nothing I said or did would of helped her stop and I didn’t want to chance being dragged down with her. She was toxic and I have plans for my future. I still left though, I left my best friend when she needed someone stable. She needed to know that I still loved her no matter what she did or the mistakes she made. In my heart we’re still sisters and that’s my punishment, I still care so I still hurt every time I see what she’s doing.