My best friend is in a mental ward. Something wasn’t right behind her smile, and even though her friends tried to help, the problem was way beyond a simple blues. This morning I found her message, and I can’t describe the feeling I got from it. Vacuity, perhaps? It seemed like many bad things were suddenly converging right above me. It’s bad enough to receive a ‘pop confession’ from someone I trusted (it all got solved later, fortunately) to learn soon afterwards that my best friend’s mind hasn’t been that okay, after all.

My mom had told me one day that one of her friends in New York went crazy and she had visited her in the mental ward. She was about my age by then. Maybe my life is a bizarre copy of my mom’s, which is not bad at all. But that’s not the point. The point is, despite it all, my friend has not changed; she is the same great person I studied with, almost my sister, the only girl who’s never come up with a stupid complaint that could risk our friendship. She is my true best friend. And I can’t think of her as a mental case or a crazy woman. No, wherever she is, she is exactly who she’s always been.

I hope everything turns out well, because all I care about right now, in terms of friendship, is her welfare.