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One day you look back and realize that your best friend isn’t your best friend anymore. That the peak of your friendship, the moment you were most secure in the belief that you cared about someone and they cared about you, that moment’s in the past. And it’s never a big thing. No life-changing road trips, no high school graduations, no proms or proposals or sunset vacations. It’s sitting on the floor of the bedroom you have a key to, shitty eighties pop blasting in your ears and a badly-rolled blunt smoking against your thumb.
People don’t realize that losing a friendship is a lot like death. You can always feel it creeping up, you can convince yourself you’ve already grieved, but it’ll still hits you like a freight train. Hard, fast, bloody. There’s always that moment you realize months have slipped through your fingertips and your friend’s gotten a haircut without you realizing it.
Death wasn’t new to him. It was the theme of his life. Other kids remembered the sandbox in the back of the park, their first crush’s shampoo, the sound of the ice cream truck three blocks away. His first memory was his aunt curling his hair for his parents’ funeral. Closed casket was part of his vocabulary at the age of four.
He still remembered the last day he’d spent with Ned and MJ. It had been right after school let out senior year, Ned’s eighteenth birthday, and a few of their friends were gathered in his bedroom. As the night dragged on people began to slink out until only MJ and Peter were left. They opened all the windows, turned on the fans, and opened the bag of shitty pot Peter had taken from a terrified petty thief over in the Lower East Side. Ned’s mom could probably smell what they were doing, but none of them cared.
“Ned. Ned, guess what?” Peter said, exhaling a long stream of smoke. The popcorn ceiling stared back at him, the cold wood slick refreshing on his spine.
“What?”
“You’re old enough to make a dating profile now.”
MJ nodded. “You should get Bumble.”
Ned scrunched up his face and took the blunt from Peter. “This is some shitty weed, man.”
“Why shouldn’t he just get Tinder?” Peter asked.
“The dynamics are fantastic on Bumble. None of that machismo nonsense,” MJ said. “Women get to make the first move.”
“Stop humble-bragging about your hundred in Spanish,” Ned muttered. “Why don’t I just get both?”
MJ took a drag and pinched up her face. “Why’d we let Peter roll again? He has no idea what he’s doing.”
“You’re the one who recycled our Monster bong. And Ned, buddy, you have to get a dating app.”
“But I look like a fucking, fucking hamster-frog thing in all my photos.”
“The ladies will totally swoon over you and your weirdly-sized reptile legs,” Peter said. “The guys too.”
MJ laid on the floor and made a noise vaguely resembling a ribbit.
Smoked curled around their ears. Their eyes were red and their laughs easy. Karma Chameleon came on shuffle and Ned sang along off key, and the rest of the night was spent poking fun at people who put their star sign in their Bumble bio.
Three months later, when they were scattered across the country, Peter would realize that was the greatest night of their friendship. Ned was at Georgia Tech, MJ at UC Berkeley, and Peter at Columbia. And none of them had spoken to each other in weeks.
It wasn’t like there was anything stopping them from talking. In fact, they’d started out the year with weekly hour-long calls each Tuesday night. But soon the calls dropped off and one day Peter was lying awake in his dorm, staring at the ceiling, realizing the best days of his friendships were in the past.
It’s funny what you remember.
Losing friends is a lot like death. He’d said it before but the thought spun around and around in his mind. Death was a warm blanket, life cold and endless. He wasn’t suicidal, no, but he wasn’t happy. Not unhappy either. A tangled, unbalanced middle ground.
Maybe he was still mourning his parents and Uncle Ben and Mr. Stark and all the friends he’d had and never had. Maybe he was just a depressed weirdo who needed to get out of his own head.
The last day he’d spent with Mr. Stark had been quiet. Technically there’d been those moments in the battlefield, light and adrenaline flickering through his veins and blood rushing through his head. Technically he’d been alive and dead and alive again. Technically there’d been years in the middle. But the last day he’d spent with Mr. Stark had been quiet.
Peter was a Queens kid, born and raised, so you’d never catch him admitting that his favorite pizza place was this hole in the wall counter in Manhattan. But it was. Their sauce wasn’t too sweet, their cheese blisteringly hot, their crust thin. That day he’d swung over, ordered himself eight cheese slices, and climbed onto the nearest roof, the one with the good HVAC system for leaning against.
He sat there scarfing down pizza by himself, letting the air hit his chin. It had rained earlier that day and the sun beat down mercilessly, steam filling the air.
“If I ever lose you I’ll know where to look. When was the last time you went three days without stopping here?”
“Hey Mr. Stark.”
“A little birdie told me that you forgot to show up for your internship on Wednesday.”
“Sorry, I really meant to be there. You know I love spending time with Dummy.”
“And I’m sure that’s it. No care for little old me. But it’s fine, it’s fine. I’m glad you’re going out. Just don’t follow in my footsteps too much. Keep the embarrassing tabloids to once, twice a month.” He stepped out of the suit and brushed his suit before shrugging and sitting down on the dirty white roof.
“I’m not gonna give you a slice.”
“It’s hot as hell out here, Pete.”
Peter just hummed, folding up another slice and eating it in three bites. When he was done he put the flimsy white plate with the green trim down on his stack.
They didn’t talk much. It wasn’t unusual, per say, for them to be quiet. Peter was chatty, but he enjoyed the silence as well. It took him a while to get to that place, to be comfortable with the displacement of another person, but something about a hot summer day just drains the life right out of your words. Like the muggy air’s leaching into your skin and your eyelashes, pulling everything down and making your tongue too heavy.
There’s beauty in the ugly summer days, when the sun’s too bright and the cars too mean and the people too sweaty to think. When the air’s thick and metallic, laced with the smell of bird shit and rotting garbage. Peter didn’t know how long they sat up there, saying nothing. It could have been five minutes, it could have been hours.
That was the last real day Peter spent with Mr. Stark.
Two weeks after Mr. Stark died Peter accidentally killed a man while on patrol.
He went back out the next day, and the day after that, and his mouth tasted like old sugar.
The end of a friendship is a lot like death. They’re the same thing, an end to something beautiful that you’ll never get back. Or the end to something painful, or something in between.
Peter liked organic chemistry, and he didn’t think about Ned when he wrote stupid puns in the margins of his notebook. There was a poster of Dr. Banner in the corner of his professor's room, but office hours didn’t make him remember the way Mr. Stark used to mutter under his breath about his endearingly overqualified friend. Each picket in front of the library didn’t remind him of MJ.
It’s odd, the things you remember when it’s over.
Peter liked his new roommate, loved hating the cafeteria food and his neurotic stats professor. But it scared him how much of his old life he was forgetting.
One day, halfway across the only dirty building left in Hell’s Kitchen, Peter realized that he’d pulled on his suit without thinking about who made it for him.
Losing a friend is a lot like death. It’s devastating until suddenly it’s not, and all you’re left with is the guilt that you don’t feel worse.