"Thank you."
"For what exactly?" I asked, furrowing my eyebrows and tilting my head slightly to look at him better.
"You're my best friend but you stood by me, you cared for me and you comforted me more than my supposed girlfriend did. So, thank you." His voice cracked in the end and all I could do was smile softly.
"That's what friends are for." I stated sincerely.
"I love you, sis." The smile on my face grew bigger and I tried to answer as whole-heartedly as I could.
"I love you too, bro."
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Friends. That was what we were. What I strived for us to be.
I was there for him when he had his first heartbreak, kept him company through phone calls and texts from 6 in the morning to 12 midnight to make sure he wasn't lonely.
He's the only person who is able to take one look at me and know that something's up and he'd know what to say to cheer me up.
He is my best friend, someone who I don't need words to communicate with, someone I run to when things go bad, someone I lean on when I'm tired, whose shoulder I cry on when I've had enough of life's crap, whose ears are ready to listen to me rant 24/7.
He became a steady rock that stayed rooted even when the waves came crashing in during high tide.
He became someone I expected to always stand by me no matter what happens.
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"You know we'll be separating soon for college, right?" His expression was shadowed and I couldn't tell what he's feeling.
"Yeah, but we'll still keep in touch, we'll still be best friends, won't we?" Hope tinged his voice.
I smiled, "Yeah, of course."
I stuck out my pinky, looking at him expectantly.
He looked at my pinky and smiled, shaking his head. "Childish," he muttered.
I stuck out my tongue at him and hooked our pinkies together.
Sealed.
---------
Since then, I made sure it was my job to prevent our friendship from reaching it's end.
But I was naive; gullible and stupid. If only I knew.
The line that represents the boundaries of friendship, separating it from something more, is often blurred as the proximity between two people shrink.
People around me warned me as our friendship grew throughout the years, their voices of doubt going in one ear and out the other.
"There's no way that you two are just friends. A guy and a girl can't just be friends."
"Are you sure you feel nothing more?"
Maybe it was my ignorance, how I shrugged off those comments.
Or maybe my conscience subconsciously registered all the remarks made by people around us and became a catalyzer that encouraged things to unfold the way they did.
If only I knew just how blurred the line between friendship and something more can be.
If only I knew that the more you grow to love that person, the harder it is to make out the line that you shouldn't cross between friends.
But nonetheless, this is my story.
The story of how that line became blurred to me as time went by.
The story of how I may or may not have fallen for my best friend.
The story of how I subconsciously set my heart on my sleeve and signed myself up for heartbreak.