I think we should start keeping score of our arguments. not because i care about winning, i just want statistical evidence that im suffering, and winning. its just ridiculous to me, and everyone else, that he wasnt always like this. There was a time when he and i barely had to argue at all. we worked together. he handled the easy parts, i handled the parts nobody else wanted to touch, and somehow it worked. and we made a good pair. More than that, we were best friends. we were alike in so many ways, and completely different in others, but somehow those differences worked. we understood each other. we knew how the other person thought. there was never this constant feeling that every conversation was going to turn into an argument over something neither of us wouldve cared about five years ago. Then this incident came. im not going to write about it. thats not important here. What matters is that something changed after it. not immediately, perhaps. but eventually, i started noticing it. he became softer. more emotional. more sensitive. more concerned with feelings than i ever remember him being. the person i used to know disappeared and was replaced by someone who could disagree with me about everything. and i mean everything. we could argue about something as stupid as what to eat and somehow end up discussing morality, emotions, logic, and whether i have a functioning soul. its exhuasting. we’ve changed in complete opposite directions. i approach things with my head. he approaches them with his heart. i look at a situation and ask what makes sense, he looks at it and asks how everyone feels. we used to be so alike, we used to be different in ways that complemented each other, now we’re different in ways that collide. and i think thats what bothers me the most. i wasnt expecting us to stay the same forever. people change. i know that better than most people do. i just never expected the change to take us this far apart. there are moments when im sitting across from him during an argument and i realize i have no idea what hes talking about. not because hes unclear, No. but because i cant understand how he arrived at his conclusion in the first place. and i imagine he probably thinks the exact same thing about me. maybe thats what happens to people. you can spend years thinking someone is your closest friend, know how they think, know how they’ll react, know what they’ll say before they say it, and then one day you look at them and realize you dont recognize them anymore. or maybe thats the worst possibility, maybe i recognize him perfectly. and this is just who he became. or maybe im the one who never noticed that we were becoming strangers. its just frustrating. he used to be like me. not exactly, obviously. but close enough that i could look at him and know he understood. i taught him things. I showed him how i did things, how i thought, how to stop caring about every little consequence. he learned from me, and for a while, it felt like we were moving through the world with the same understanding of it. careless. detached. in a way. and now he has decided that being soft is the better choice. that whatever happened was supposed to change us. i regret what i did, i cant change it, and i know sitting here regretting it isnt going to undo anything. but sometimes i wonder if that was the moment everything started moving in a direction neither of us expected. he did change. he changed thats the simple answer. i just dont know what to do with the person he became. Because when i talk to him now, i dont feel like I’m talking to the person who use to stand beside me. the person who didnt care. the person i taught, worked with, trusted, and somehow managed to call my best friend. im talking to someone whos the opposite of me. and maybe thats what confuses me. i spent so much time teaching him how to be like me, only for him to decide that he didnt want to be. maybe he was always capable of becoming this person.
Whatever, either way, i dont know whether im angry at him for changing, angry at myself what for happend, or simply frustrated that I can’t make sense of it. and probably all the three. i just wish i understood when we stopped being the same kind of people
Sincerely, The opposite half