It Happens to the Best of Us

A woman narrates the story of her best friend, a successful and seemingly perfect woman who in the end surprised everyone unexpectedly. ~ This is fiction - It is NOT based on real life characters. ~

We met in college. It didn’t take long for me to see her as pretty much my own personal Goddess. I was always the shy kid who was terrified to speak to anyone; and she was this confident perfect person who everyone couldn’t help but love.

Sometimes I think how if we hadn’t ended up being roommates by chance, she would have never approached me and I would have just admired her from a distance without ever getting close to her either. But life wanted us together, I guess, because after our lives crossed paths, we never got separated. At least not until recent events, that is.

From the start, she made it her job to guide me through life so I could live the way I wanted instead of living in fear and awkwardness. Her advice was always on point, from clothes to boys, it was as if she knew everything. Within only a couple of months, my confidence had already skyrocketed. Of course, it seriously helped to have someone like her around me all the time, but even when she wasn’t around, I could see a change in myself.

Even though we spent a lot of time talking about life, figuring out what clothes made me look the best, how I could wear my hair, etc, neither of us ever put our studies behind. Since we were both majoring in Business Administration, we helped each other study and keep ourselves at the top of our classes every single semester.

Most of the time, I didn’t have the energy to go out to parties and meet new people, especially men. Studying so hard just made me want to collapse in bed and sleep for as long as I could. But somehow Diana always seemed to have energy for everything. She met with her parents once a week for lunch, hung out with her friends that she couldn’t see much through the week, went partying every Friday and Saturday night; and somehow, she kept as good grades as I did, if not better. All that on top of keeping an active life; she loved go to running or hiking, visiting new places every time she got the chance. There had to always be an adventure with her.

After college, we both went ahead and got our Master’s. That’s when I decided to start working from home and stop my studies, since I felt my career was at a pretty good spot already. But she was never satisfied.

We moved together not long after I started working from home and she started culinary school on top of getting her PhD. Her life was insane; there was not a single moment that she was just chilling doing nothing; and she loved every second of her chaotic life. Or at least that’s what it looked like.

Through the years, men came and went for her. Most of them didn’t have clear goals in life and just wanted to party and have sex all day every day; Diana loved to have fun, but she knew how to keep a balance, and in the end, her studies and life goals always came first. She didn’t have time for people who thought otherwise, and that didn’t even bother her. She always knew that even though she didn’t have a lot of people in her life, she definitely had the right people, and that’s what really mattered.

I didn’t have many friends of my own, but Diana always took me with her anywhere she went, so her friends became my friends too. Most of them eventually met a special someone and got married and had kids. They kept bugging us about when that’d happen for us; I’m pretty sure they even thought we were a thing and that’s why neither of us was ever rushing to meet our ‘other half’.

We really never saw each other that way. I think we were simply happy with our own lives and welcoming someone into it romantically would complicate things in a way neither of us wanted.

She was way too busy anyway. While she was in culinary school, she also got an internship at a nearby restaurant that her uncle owned. She loved it there and would work as many hours as her schedule would allow. After her studies were complete, she went ahead and opened her own seafood restaurant. That had been her dream ever since we met. It was the most wonderful thing seeing her realize her dream after hearing about it for almost a decade.

It didn’t take long for the locals to get a taste of her amazing food and spread the word. Soon, her restaurant was full every single day, and sometimes even reservations would be needed.

She asked me to be her business partner when things got too hectic for her to manage on her own. Now I regret ever declining her offer. I always preferred a chill stress-free life, working from home 9 hours of the day, helping manage a small cyber company, that was good enough for me.

Luckily, another one of her friends had experience in business management and agreed to be her business partner. Not gonna lie, I expected things to go sideways, considering how many friendships and even family bonds I’ve seen broken over businesses, but it all went smoothly.

They expanded the restaurant and made it almost twice as big as it had started. And with her friend taking on half of the responsibilities, Diana finally had time for herself again.

That’s when things started to change. At first, she used her free time the same way she always had; she met with her parents, went out with friends, dragged me with her on adventures to see new places, and so on. Eventually, though, we started seeing less and less of her. She would always make up an excuse as to not go out, even with her parents. They visited a couple times to check up on her and everything seemed fine, they joked around, talked about her job, played some boring card games, the usual.

Occasionally, she’d still go out with us to a club or bar, but she stayed in a seat without mingling with anyone, and that was unlike her. She kept saying she was too tired, or had a headache. At first, we thought it was just age catching up to her; after 30, isn’t all the partying supposed to slow down anyway?

I even found a couple awesome places for us to visit on our vacations and she wasn’t into it. She said she wanted to stay working, she didn’t want to leave all the restaurant’s responsibilities to her business partner even if only for a short period of time; even though they trusted each other fully and her partner did take all her vacation days and Diana was fine taking all the responsibilities by herself for a bit.

One time, I was feeling down because of a heated conversation I had with my parents, so we both sat down in the living room with a bottle of our finest wine. It didn’t take long for us to open up to each other. I went on and on about how I didn’t feel the need for a man in my life and how much I hated it that my parents couldn’t accept that; just because I was over 30, they thought they had the right to push me to meet a man and settle down, even though that’s not something I wanted.

She laughed not because she thought it was stupid of me to be mad at the situation, but because it was exactly the same for her, and she was the type of person that laughed instead of crying. We laughed about it together and I finally let go of my anger. Then she got serious.

“Do you ever feel that life is so complete already that there’s really nowhere else for it to go?” she asked me, staring blank at the wall.

It got me thinking and made me realize that neither of us had really talked about future life goals for a long time. I was happy with where I was in life and had no intention to make any changes. She told me how it was the same for her. She felt completely fulfilled, and at such an early age.

Her whole life consisted in looking forward to something. Getting into a prestigious college, graduating with the highest grades, advancing more and more academically, getting work experience and being the best at what she did, opening her own restaurant, expanding said restaurant, then what? Her career was at its peak, she had amazing friends that checked up on her every day, her family was always close by; she felt like nothing was missing, and at the same time, there was nothing to work towards.

With an ear-to-ear smile on her face she raised her half full glass and said, “let’s enjoy this perfect life as much as we can, because we never know how long it will last.” She drank the rest of the wine and went to bed.

The next day, she finally woke up in the mood to take vacations and we made plans to travel across the world for three weeks. We would see new cultures and amazing places that nature had created and preserved, exactly the type of thing that used to make her so excited before.

In the days before vacations started, there was no change, though. She still made excuses to not hangout with her loved ones. As long as she wasn’t in the restaurant, she was in her bed, browsing through her phone, listening to music or simply lying down doing nothing at all.

One thing I also noticed was how her eating habits changed. She was eating her favorite foods every day, not caring about how much she ate or how much weight she put on. She’s always loved food so much, plus she was such a confident person that having a few extra pounds was nothing on her, so I didn’t think anything of it.

We had the time of our lives during our vacations. We met so many people from different places, ate foods we had no idea even existed, hung out with rare friendly animals, it was perfect. It had been a long time since I last saw her that happy and restless; she didn’t want to stay in a hotel for longer than needed to sleep and shower, she always wanted to go to the next adventure.

When we got home, I thought things would be back to normal, that she’d be her usual restless self again; all she needed was a nice vacation to get her back to herself, right?

We both still had a couple more days work-free, so we went out with our group of friends and had a lot of fun in a club, she even gave her number to some random guy she met. She also called her parents and we all cooked a nice meal for the four of us.

The next day, it was time for her to go back to the restaurant; I thought she’d be so excited, considering how much she loved her job. Nothing prepared me for what I woke up to that morning.

She was usually up by 6:30am if she was going for a run, otherwise she’d wake up at 7:00am and be on her way by 7:40am. My shift didn’t start until 9:00am, so she would always be gone before I woke up.

That morning, I made my cup of coffee as usual, and went out to get the paper and mail. I noticed her car was still parked outside and thought it was odd considering it was well past 8:00am already. I knocked on her door and told her how late it was; with three weeks of vacations, I bet she just forgot to set her alarm. Then I opened the door and my cup fell to the floor, the hot coffee burning my feet as it soaked them.

She was lying there, perfectly still, with a black bag over her head and tape sealing it around her neck.

Every single moment that she wasn’t herself came running back to my memory. Every singe sign that I could have caught, but chose to ignore instead. I didn't even notice until much later, a note standing on her bedside table saying "I'm sorry, but this is for the best."

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“Is there anything you feel could help give you closure?” my therapist asked after a moment of silence.

“I don’t think I can ever move on from this. There is no such thing as closure,” another tear fell down my already soaked face, “if it can happen to someone as perfect as her, where does that leave the rest of us?”