My best friend was trying to lose weight, so I blocked her.

The Rise and Fall of Toxic Bonds

My toxic best friend convinced everyone I was threatening her life, so I blew up her lies and cut her out completely. A year later, she’s back online, quietly trying to turn people against me again.

Aife was my best friend for a month straight. She was loud, funny, and her mom was the best.

Whenever I left school, Awife’s mom would always wave at me while smiling. It was a really good feeling because my parents were workaholics who were basically absent in my life.

So, even though Aweife was known for not being able to hold down a friend for longer than a month, I loved her. All our clothes were free reign for each other and all her enemies were mine, too.

So, that’s how I met the most deranged girl I’d ever encountered called Mia. A wife didn’t give me much detail, just told me Mia was a beach. So, that was enough for me.

Soon, we were making fake accounts on Instagram and messaging asking to be her friend. At first, it was really funny.

She had no idea it was me, and she was even facetiming Aif about how weird Holly, the fake account, was. It wasn’t long before Mia figured it out and blocked us both. Lol.

So, 2 weeks later, I found out why I was Aif’s only friend. We were on a school trip when she spread rumors about me for literally no reason.

She said I had tried to kiss every boy in the class, but they had all rejected me. I should have seen it coming, but 14-year-old me was so naive.

So, instead of getting revenge, I got depressed. That whole summer was the worst period of my life.

I could barely get out of bed in the morning, and my only joy was found in making those mood boards on Tumblr. During that time is when I somehow started talking to Mia.

We had just one thing in common. We both hated Awuff.

We’d literally text almost every day just to talk about her, and it was invigorating every single time. So, after 2 years of constant gossiping, I finally took the train to see her.

The first thing I noticed was that she looked nothing like her Instagram. Not even trying to be mean.

I genuinely didn’t know it was her when she opened the door, but I looked past it because I knew what it felt like to be insecure as heck. Mia was the one who got me into cigarettes.

And whenever we met up, we would play GTA or talk about our shitty exes together. We were the stereotypical 16-year-old duo until C Vid hit.

Every day, she was posting on her Snapchat private story about how little she was eating. She posted how she had gotten a special high caloric drink from the doctors but wasn’t drinking it.

She also posted how she was eating literally nothing every single day. It worried me a lot, and we’d even have fights where I tried to get her to eat.

I tried to tell her that control didn’t have to be found in starvation. I even sent her those eat with me Tik Toks to remind her that eating is something that is necessary and not weird or bad.

Meanwhile, I was going through the worst time of my life. My granddad had suddenly passed and I myself was eating so little that I could barely walk without feeling extreme pain in my calves.

But whenever I tried to talk about myself, she would either leave me undelivered or shift the conversation back to her problems. So, I just let myself be her therapist because it was better than being alone.

But then I noticed the cracks in her story. When school started again, she was posting herself in her uniform and talking about how much she was dreading it.

The weird part was that she told me she hadn’t eaten in days. Whenever I tell people this story, they always say, “Oh, but you can still function when you don’t eat blah blah”. No.

If you are starving for weeks on end with zero food, you will not be able to go to school and act normally. But I was just a 16-year-old who wanted to believe my friends could do no wrong. So, I never questioned her.

And that’s when our friendship ended over a pair of AirPods. You see, my friend Liam had gone to Mia’s house with me before Cid and left his AirPods behind.

So, by this point, months later, he was practically itching for them back. He even offered to stand outside her house and she could throw it outside her bedroom window.

And when Mia refused with the excuse of being too busy, even I started getting suspicious. And Liam was the opposite of me.

He was assertive and not afraid to step on people’s toes. So one day he asked me if I could go to her house with him to get the AirPods.

At this point, he was the only one who didn’t treat me like a piece of sha stuck on the bottom of their shoe. So I caved.

On the way there, I texted Mia saying me and Liam were coming to collect the AirPods. Suddenly, my phone was buzzing with a wall of excuses.

“I’m at my aunt’s house”. “My bedroom door is locked from the outside”. “Leave me alone”.

Were all messages she actually sent. I started crying and begging Liam to turn back and get them another time, but he wasn’t budging.

That’s how he ended up at Mia’s front door, asking his sister to get the AirPods for him. Lo and behold, the room was unlocked and he got his AirPods back.

There were scratches all over them and they had ear wax he didn’t recognize. That’s when I finally realized she was a lying beach and I blocked her.

But the next day, I was once again faced with the reality of how naive I truly was.