BLACK AND WHITE

You would be surprised how much you can have in common with someone completely different from you. As an introvert, making friends has always been so hard for me. During my childhood days, I always had people to move to and fro with so I never really thought friendship was a problem for me, but it was during my teenage years that I realized I was so much different from the girls around me. I'm not a prude but modesty is and always will be a priority for me but these friends had no issue showing body parts that had to be covered in public, they loved attention and they were too loud. All these and many others that I realized I didn’t align with so I had to draw away because I refused to be pulled in by peer pressure. There were many times I felt lonely because I realized I couldn’t just flow with the people around. Due to this I didn’t have the pleasure of creating fun memories with friends whilst in high school. Everything back in there was monotonous.

Whilst entering college I hoped for a change because honestly life as an introvert can be both boring and depressing if you don’t have the right people to accept you. Thank the heavens, I met Leila. Leila and I have been best friends since first year in college. We were both reading the same course; Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Leila is an extrovert and she made that pretty much obvious on the first day of lectures. By the end of lectures our lecturer and the whole class knew of her, and I know there are people like that, you can’t fail to acknowledge their presence when they are in a room with you, they just have that impact effortlessly.

I met her again later in the day at one of my favorite food joints near campus and sat at the same table with her. She initiated the conversation as expected since I wasn’t willing to speak that much and I realized she had managed to pull me out my shell;. she made me speak a lot more than I thought possible. I really enjoyed her company. We met a couple of times after that day and soon we became an item; best friends.

Leila preferred to be at the bars and dance, I preferred to be at home and read novels. She’s the jokes and I’m the shy smiles. She was very impulsive and adventurous and I was very cautious. She was very confident in most situations whilst I would just stare at the floor. We were opposites in many ways but we made it work, we harmonized. As much as we had our many differences we had similarities too; we both loved food, we were hopeless romantics and family was everything to us.

There were many times we came across people who seemed shocked anytime they got to know we were best friends; even till this day we still get the same reactions but what I always tell them is that simplicity and complexity need each other.

It has not been forever smooth though, there were times we fought over my insecurities and jealousy and times we fought over her intolerance about certain about me. There were times we would go out and I felt Leila was getting way too comfortable with other people and ignoring me, moments when I would voice out to her out of frustration, pain and jealousy that if she felt she can’t have as a best friend any longer then she should just let me go because during those moments I felt she probably couldn’t endure being tied to someone like me any longer and was not reciprocating the amount of energy she freely gave.

We would argue and fight and ignore each other for days. The longest we ever went was a week and I must admit that week was the most torturing and slow week I’ve ever had. Deciding to be the bigger person, I reached out and apologized and we came back together. It was during those moments that I realized I really appreciated our friendship than I let on and somehow I was allowing fear to conquer me and destroy our friendship. Willing to work out our issues and drop them behind us, we both had a heart to heart talk and spoke of whatever was bothering us and the way forward. 

I remember one particular dire situation that broke us apart but somehow we came back together was when the boy I was crushing on and I thought liked me back was actually just using me a tool to get closer to Leila. Though Leila was innocent in all that I felt betrayed. I cut her off and decided to move on because I felt she was shadowing me with her vibrant energy. We avoided each other a whole semester. It was during the succeeding academic year that we managed to work things out and we’ve been inseparable since then till now.

As two individuals with different personalities I know we can’t avoid hurdles but its the commitment we have for this friendship that will make us work. I've come to realize that there will surely be moments when I will feel intimated whenever I feel someone is taking my best friend away but I have to trust Leila. A good and surviving friendship is built on trust, commitment and loyalty.

I’m glad I got Leila as a best friend. Someone who understood me so well. She invested into our friendship as I did and has helped us stay strong to this day. I will always be grateful for fighting for the success of our friendship and not leaving me alone to my insecurities. She’s someone I least expected as a friend much less a best friend, but somehow the universe brought us together. So I have come to believe that we can have so much in common with someone completely different from us just like the colors black and white; they are different colors but they both are neutral.