Two years before it ever happened I knew it was coming. It was always at the back of my mind taunting me every time I saw her. Through all the fights, laughs, and general time with each other, I knew it would all be taken away.
        

Throughout those two years I didn’t know when it was going to happen, always a mystery. The next 6 months? Next year? I think she always knew when it was going to happen, but she never had the heart to tell me. We had planned so many things in our lives out with each other. High school? We would go to the same high school. She would play goalie on varsity lacrosse and I would be on the soccer team scoring goals left and right with her “blocking” them. In those two years we spent all the time we could together. Going places for and with each other. But came eighth-grade.
        

At the beginning of the year I did not think about it at all. I knew that it was coming. I knew that I could not do anything about it. I went on with life, focusing on school, grades, and relationships with people, but the person who had been there with me through it all? Where had she gone? Oh yeah, I left her for my new best friend, a person she hated.

Months went by but then I realized she was my true friend in a sea of others. I started to leave my “best friend” coming back to her. By that point I apologized, we made up, and everything was back to normal, but never was quite the same as before. But, the end of eighth grade, graduation, was fast approaching. Soon our time together would come to an end. The memories, the library, those late night talks, fading into distant memories.
        

It was the eighth grade dance, one of the biggest events of the year, and that was when I was completely sure that she would leave after graduation. She had told me during the dance. Later that week I wrote a letter. The letter held everything, our best memories, our roughest times, and how i felt about everything. Not just our time together, but one era ending and another beginning.

Graduation day finally came. I was a nervous wreck. On the outside was a joyful facade, on the inside i was dreading one, and only one, thing. Seeing her for the last time. As all two hundred and forty of us started to walk in our shimmering red robes to take our diplomas, that was when my heart sank. Everything was coming to an end. There was static in the air. Everyone was cheerful that we were onto a new chapter in life. So was i. Getting away from so many people i had been stuck with for eight years. A new school. A new atmosphere. But, that high that everyone was on, came crashing when i walked out of the auditorium after so many others. I laid eyes upon her standing, tears in her eyes, in the middle of the courtyard, the whole world around me crashed into nothingness, only she was left. We locked eyes. Like in that scene in every movie ever, we ran to each other and embraced. I felt her heat against my body. Her muffled voice was all I could hear. Her body riled up and started to shudder, that is when tears rolled down my face too. We stood there in the middle of the chaos that was the courtyard filled with hundreds of people like nothing was happening. She pulled away and looked up at me,

“Here, take this.”

She placed the envelope in the palm of my hand.With my eyes blurred I looked down at her and did not say a word. I took my very own letter and placed it in her hand. We stood there looking at each other. This was our goodbye and we knew it. No one said anything because there was no point. We knew what was happening.
We got shaken back into reality by her father yelling after her,

“Come on, let's go!”

Tears in my eyes, I embraced her one last, long, hard time before finally, letting her go.