Buckle up, fam, because this is about to be a *ride,* whether you agree with me or not. 

So, I had two very good friends - my best friend, who we'll call Val, and another, who we'll call Todd. We met in our seventh grade band class, and this story takes place primarily in our junior year of college, so we'd known each other a long time by this point. Val was my absolute best friend - she called my parents "Mama" and "Daddy," and we'd taken her on a family trip to Cancun with us during mine and Val's senior year of high school. We were basically inseparable, to the point that our teachers would get us mixed up sometimes, even though she is a blonde, white girl, and I'm Indian. 

Todd and I had a somewhat different dynamic, we communicated mostly through sassing and sniping at one another, especially in high school. However, Todd and I went to the same college, and Val went to one about an hour away from ours. During the first two years of undergrad, Todd and I became very good friends - we lived in buildings right next to each other, and I felt comfortable with him. We were both in the same major, so we spent a reasonable amount of time together without Val around. 

During the summer between my second and third year of undergrad, I came down with horrible stomach/intestinal pains. I could barely eat, I had headaches and issues sleeping, and I constantly felt panicked. The doctors said it was acid reflux, which in hindsight doesn't make any sense, but nothing they gave me helped. As I learned later, it was my anxiety manifesting itself in IBS, but from early August through mid-October, I had no idea what was really happening to me or why. It was during this time that I realized that I had feelings for Todd. Maybe it was because we texted every day and his presence in that capacity comforted me, or maybe it just happened that way, but there it was. I couldn't keep a secret from Val for more than thirty seconds, so of course I immediately told her. She had expressed the idea that we would be cute together several times in the past nine years (and many others had mistaken us for dating), so she seemed happy about it. Nevertheless, I was simply feeling too awful at the time to really deal with my feelings - I had an extremely intense course load that semester, and most nights I could hardly sleep due to my yet-undiagnosed anxiety. Val was having a difficult time in school as well, her texts conveying a difficult course load, as well as dissatisfaction with her friends. 

One week, she was so miserable that I convinced Todd to drive us both down to her college for the day as a surprise, and went down to spend the day with her, despite having slept all of 20 minutes the night before. At that point, I didn't mind because I would have done anything for her because she was my best friend. The whole day, though, I couldn't shake the feeling that she was basically ignoring me for Todd. I'm generally not a sensitive person, and with everything else going on, I shook off the uneasiness. About two or three weeks later, however, she texted me an essay about how she had feelings for Todd, and she knew I did, too, and that she was sorry about it. I had kind of started to suspect something along those lines before the messages, based on her behavior during our trip and the time a few weeks before that when she was visiting us and did pretty much the same thing. I told her that people couldn't help their feelings, and I didn't want anything to ruin our friendship. I lied. I was *pissed* as anything. I mean, her school had how many thousands of guys? And she had to like the one guy in our entire 9 years of friendship that I had feelings for? But, I really didn't want to ruin our friendship (and I was on some good anxiety meds by then), so I let it go. I was an idiot. 

About two days before winter break ended (about two months later, for reference), she texted me that she had something to tell me, and that "I wouldn't like it." At that point, I figured that Todd had asked her out, and that she'd said no, or wanted to ask if it was alright with me, or something. **Wrong*****.*** She was texting to tell me that Todd had, in fact, asked her out, but she'd actually said yes. Fun times. On some level, I could accept that. Her friendship meant a lot to me (even though it was now clear that mine didn't mean as much to her), but I just wanted to know why. Why she would potentially throw away our friendship and my trust to date him. She didn't have an answer for me. I called her because I wanted to talk about it, and she just cried for an entire hour before I felt so shitty about being angry that I had to hang up. I didn't curse at her or anything (I parked my car in an abandoned parking lot and screamed alone for an hour to get it out beforehand), but I definitely wanted to know *why*. And she didn't have an answer, and that made me increasingly angry. I asked her why she would choose him over me, and she just asked me why it had to be a choice. (I have all the texts, but I don't know if you guys want to read them, I can post them if you do.) She basically kept telling me and implying that I was overreacting.  I still wanted to fix our friendship though, and Todd and I had a class next semester, so I decided to just try to make my peace with it. 

Unfortunately, 'twas not to be. I saw Todd on the first day back, and I asked him how his vacation was. He hadn't messaged me about asking Val out, and I wanted to see if he would tell me. He just made several awkward, panicked faces before mumbling out an excuse and literally running away. I figured he might have somewhere to be, and knew I'd see him the next day in class. He's a leftie, so he usually sits on the left end of the aisle, and I sit in the right handed seat next to him. As I walked into class, he was in his seat, but when he looked over and saw me coming in, he put his backpack on the seat next to him. Message received. 

Later that day, I called Val to ask what was up with him, and she told me that he might be a bit awkward because *she told him that I liked him*. Without my permission, she decided to tell something that I told her in confidence to the one person I didn't want to know about it! That was basically the moment that both of those friendships ended for me. I tried to fight it - I went up to Todd before class one day and told him it was fine, that I was over him, and that we could just be friends and that was perfectly okay (it didn't fix things), and I made efforts to talk to Val, but I didn't trust her any more, and I couldn't fix that. Before all this, I was always the one who texted her first, and she texted back somewhere within 24 hours. After, I eventually stopped texting first, and I didn't really volunteer any personal information about my life because I simply didn't trust her any more. 

It has been a year since all of this happened, and I've been reflecting a lot about everything that happened. I still miss them as my friends and cherish all (okay, most) of the time we spent together, and I can't help but wonder if I was the asshole who over-reacted. 

(In case you were wondering, they broke up after around two or three months, and Todd was immediately sleeping with a British exchange student, who told me all about it, since she didn't know I knew him.) 

&amp;#x200B;