A Letter to My Almost Best Friend

I've been nurturing this letter in my chest for eons now, letting it grow unbridled like those There's something about our particular brand of friendship that defies the neat categories I've learned to live by. We exist in the spaces between, in the territory marked by what could have been rather than what is.

You were never quite my best friend, but you came close enough that I can still feel the outline of where that relationship might have lived. We stood at the threshold of something very profound, close enough to see into each other's rooms but never quite crossing over. And now I'm left with the peculiar grief that comes from mourning a depth that was always just out of reach.

Now, I think about the conversations we had that danced around the edges of real intimacy. How we shared pieces of ourselves but never quite the whole puzzle. You knew my favorite books but not why I read them mostly in the dark. You heard my laughter but never learned what made me cry into my pillow at 3am. We were fluent in each other's surface languages but strangers to the dialects of our deeper selves.

There were moments when I thought we might bridge that gap. Late nights when our texts carried more proximity than usual, when your words felt like they were reaching for something beyond the casual friendship. Times when I almost told you about the dreams that kept me awake, the fears that followed me through ordinary days. But something always pulled us back from that edge, some invisible hand that kept us in the shallows when we were both capable of deeper waters.

Maybe it was timing. Maybe we met each other in seasons when we didn't know how to be fully known. Maybe I was too guarded, too afraid of needing someone who might not need me back with the same intensity. Maybe you were protecting your own heart from the vulnerability that real friendship demands. Maybe we were both so practiced in the art of almost that we forgot how to commit to completely.

I want you to know that our almostness wasn't meaningless. The conversations we did have mattered. The laughter we shared so artistically carved out spaces in my memory that still echo when I'm alone. You taught me things about myself that I'm still discovering, showed me parts of my personality that only emerged in your particular light. Even incomplete, our friendship left marks on me that I carry with gratitude.

But I also want you to know how much it hurt to live in the space between stranger and best friend, to feel always on the verge of something deeper that never quite materialized. The kind of loneliness in being close to someone but not close enough, in having someone who almost understands you completely. It's like being perpetually thirsty while standing next to a well you can never quite access.

I wonder sometimes what would have happened if one of us had been braver. If I had asked you the questions that mattered instead of settling for the ones that were safe. If you had pushed past my walls instead of accepting them as permanent fixtures. If we had chosen vulnerability over comfort, depth over ease, the risk of actual intimacy over the safety of surface connection.

But maybe that's not fair. Maybe we gave each other exactly what we were capable of giving at the time. Maybe our almostness was perfect in its own imperfect way, a friendship that existed in the only form it could have, given who we were and where we were in our lives.

I hope you think of me sometimes, not with regret but with the same complicated fondness I feel when your name surfaces in my thoughts. I hope you remember our almostness as something beautiful rather than something sad. I hope you understand that even though we never became best friends, you were important to me in ways I'm still learning to articulate.

I hope you've found the friendships that go all the way down, the people who see you completely and love you anyway. I hope you've learned to let people past the places where we used to stop. I hope you're braver now than you were with me, more willing to risk the beautiful catastrophe of being fully known.

And if you ever think about our almostness and feel that particular ache of what might have been, know that somewhere I'm feeling it too. Know that you mattered to me in ways that had nothing to do with labels or categories. Know that almost was still something, still counts, still lives in the spaces between my ribs where I keep the friendships that shaped me and nurtured me.

Thank you for being my almost best friend. Thank you for showing me what I was hungry for, even if you couldn't feed that hunger completely. Thank you for the conversations that mattered, the moments that counted, the friendship that existed in the only way it could.

I carry our almostness with me like a pressed flower in a book I'll never finish reading. Beautiful, fragile, forever caught between what was and what could have been. In my museum of lost things.

With love for what we were and what we almost became,

Your Almost Best Friend, Muhsinah.