When I was a young girl, well, younger than I am now, I had a friend that I called my best friend. We went on trops together and it often felt like a merry-go-round, spinning around and around forever and ever and I thought that we'd last for years, or at least until graduation. It was with that same determination and consideration that i walked through life with her by my side without another thought. Then my thoughts became her thoughts and her problems became mine and the both of us stopped writing in diaries because speaking to the other was easier on our minds and our hands after long days of writing notes and essays at school that we would soon forget anyway. We treated life like one of those double inner tubes at the water park where we'd spend our whole summer, connected at the hip, at the mind, every time, always trying without fail to stand side by side. One winter I noticed that I was draining, and all the energy that I stored in my heart was going towards her and her problems and her life and when I held my hands out in return and expected something back, I got nothing but handfuls of empty promises and dark stars. Looking back on my calendar, I could see the days that slowly started my decline, I just didn't realize that at the time I was going back and forth like a pair of windshield wipers in the middle of a storm, trying to help and getting worn down but never stopping. I was supposed to shield the wind but instead the wind shielded me and my mind from seeing what was there all the time, and that was how I learned that I thought friendship was spelled like giving, and it was, I just got nothing in return. And then I tried to learn how to swim by myself in the ocean and I kept getting thrown against the rocks and it wouldn't stop and I didn't know what to do or how to stay afloat because I lost my double inner tube.