Meeting your soulmate in high school

MANILA, Philippines - I met my soulmate in the seventh grade.

We had both been studying in the same school since kindergarten, but it was the first time we had ever been homeroom classmates. At first we seemed to share a thinly veiled, mutual dislike for each other (or maybe that was just me and she actually didn’t even know my name). 

Towards the middle of the year, though, we had been assigned to direct our class’ play together during our English drama fest, which was when we learned about our shared love for The Go Go’s and reading in the dark.

I call her soulmate, because the term “best friend” doesn’t really cut it. Until we became friends, the idea of friendship was quite frankly, disposable to me. Every year would be the same: I’d meet someone in my class that I would eventually consider as my best friend, until summer would come along and we’d fall out of touch. Whatever “best friendship” I shared with these girls would be reduced to the occasional greetings in corridors, with each of us clinging to our current best friend, awkwardly ignoring the fact that we had been walking on the same side of the hallway just a year before.

Nonetheless, we took our seventh grade friendship with us to all four years of high school. No matter how far apart they put us — three classrooms away, one floor apart, one entire building apart — there would always be time for us to get in trouble together. And boy, did we get in trouble a lot. (For the sake of our parents, allow me to clarify that trouble is usually getting caught stealing each other’s Biology books from our lockers during class hours because one of us forgot it at home.)

The weird thing is that out of all the girls I have ever befriended in my young life, none of them had ever been as different from me as she is. She is, essentially, the Casio calculator to my Malibu Barbie doll. She has a brilliant analytical brain whereas I only found out last week that Pluto is no longer a planet. Sure, we have a couple of things in common, maybe enough for ordinary acquaintances to have a deep discussion over cocktails. But that never stopped us from talking. We talked to each other before class, during class (much to the distress of most of our teachers), after class, and even before going to bed. We just never ran out of things to talk about.

We spent so much time together that people began being unable to tell us apart. Our friendship was like a never-ending season of Grey’s Anatomy, minus the hot doctors and the ectopic pregnancies. If only to prove our cooler than cool friendship, we got voted Best Friendship during our senior graduation ball. (I’m actually not sure if it was really called the Best Friendship award, but I’m going with it anyway.)

Ask just about any girl — it’s hard not to feel such a deep and intense love for the best friend who’s been with you through every high and low of your young life. She and I have laughed together, cried together, and snuck into R-18 movies together while we were still in high school. No one gets me like she does, and sometimes I feel like no one ever will.

We didn’t realize what a test college would be for us, until one time we both got really drunk and admitted that the thought of studying cities away from each other was the scariest thing we ever had to do. At first we tried talking to each other as often as possible through every available medium, but our schedules were so different already that it didn’t work out very well. We had initially been suspicious of our new schoolmates, thinking they would never be as cool as we were, until we got to know them better and found out that they weren’t so bad after all.

It was a platonic long-distance relationship. We were running in different circles, and when one of us would tell interesting anecdotes about our new school friends, the other one wouldn’t know who the hell the story is about. There were many moments of us making plans but having to cancel them due to our wildly different schedules. And what I thought was the most hurtful of all was when I once made a joke that she didn’t get.

I was stumped. This was my soulmate we’re talking about. How could we not be on the same wavelength anymore? I didn’t want to confront it at first, because that would make it seem even more real. But the invisible gap was growing between us and grew even more when I started working and she began her last year in college. The one constant in my life, my best friend, was turning into someone I would just occasionally talk to when I had to.

Perhaps that is one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn in my life. Friendship fades — even the best kind. It took me awhile to resist accepting that we were growing apart, and that we have to relearn each other. It was a fact of life that I wish I had been prepared — nay, willing — to learn. Our friendship could no longer just float along the current; we had to work hard to keep it together.

Truth be told, it would be geographically and logistically easier for us to find new best friends. I’d tell you why that won’t happen, but my friend said it a lot better than I ever will: “Having each other in our lives—no matter how ever big or small a part we may play—is just not an option.”College gave us new friends and maybe even new best friends, but a soulmate? I may sound a little naïve, but I think I’ve met the only one I’ll ever need.