My Friend Became Famous and I Became Weird
Somewhere between her interviews, I forgot how to just be her friend.
Priya's face was on the side of a bus before I learned how to be happy for her. That is the ugly place this story starts, and I have stopped apologizing for it, because every other version I tried to tell began with a lie.
We met at eighteen, in a hostel room that smelled of instant noodles and mosquito coil. She had the bottom bunk and a habit of reading her poems out loud at midnight whether or not anyone was awake. I was usually awake. Her poems were not good yet. Neither were mine. That was the glue. We were bad together, at the same speed, and there is a kind of love in that which nobody warns you about losing.
For nine years it stayed roughly true. We graduated, took jobs we did not love, and kept a shared notebook that traveled between our handbags like a hostage exchange. Fridays were for cheap coffee and reading each other whatever we had managed that week. She wrote about her grandmother. I wrote about weather, mostly, because weather could not be traced back to me.
Then, on a slow Tuesday, she entered a poem into a monthly poetry contest because I dared her to. I want that on the record. I dared her.
The poem was about her grandmother's hands. The way they smelled of onions and Pond's cold cream. The way they stayed folded even in sleep, as if holding something that might spill.
It won.
A month later somebody filmed her reading it at an open mic and put the clip online, and the clip did the thing clips sometimes do. By Diwali she had an agent. By March she had a book with a marigold on the cover. By June she had a face large enough to fit on a bus.
And I became weird.
Not dramatic weird. Quiet weird. The kind you can hide from everyone except yourself. I read her interviews with a pen in my hand, like homework. I counted how many times she mentioned me. The count was zero... then once, and the once got my name wrong, "my college friend Nisha," when my name is Naina, and I carried that single wrong syllable around for a month like a pebble in my shoe.
I drafted congratulation texts and deleted them because every word looked like it was auditioning. "So proud of you" sounded like a greeting card. "You deserve this" sounded like I was grading her. I finally sent "Congratulations on your continued success," which is a sentence no human being has ever said to someone they love.
She called me on it at the cafe, stirring sugar into coffee she never used to sweeten.
"You've gone formal on me," she said. "Continued success. Who talks like that? Insurance companies talk like that."
"I'm happy for you," I said.
"You sound like a press release that is sad."
I laughed, because it was funny, and because laughing was easier than the true thing, which was that I no longer knew where to stand. For nine years we had stood shoulder to shoulder facing the same locked door. Then the door opened... swallowed her, and shut politely in my face, and I was still outside holding two coffees.
I stopped writing.
That is the part I told no one. Every line I put down sounded like a worse version of hers, so I put down fewer lines... and then none. I stopped reading poetry too. When your best friend becomes the thing you wanted to be, even a bookshop can feel like an accusation.
Then I muted her.
Online, I mean. There is no gentle way to say it. I muted my best friend the way you turn a photograph face down, and I told myself it was self care, which is what we say now instead of admitting we are jealous.
The phone rang at 1:40 in the morning that November. She was in a Delhi hotel, one sleep away from her biggest television interview, and she was crying in that hiccupy way I had not heard since the hostel.
"I can't do it," she said. "They sent the questions. All of them are about the grandmother poem. Naina, I've written a hundred poems since. Everyone wants the same forty seconds of me, on a loop, forever. I feel like a jukebox with one song."
I said something useless about how she would be great. And then she said the sentence that took the roof off my little house of self-pity.
"Everyone talks to the poster now. You are the only person left who knew me before I was laminated."
I sat in my dark kitchen with the fridge humming and understood, finally, what I had been doing. While I was busy mourning my old role in her life, she was awake at 2 a.m. auditioning for the role of herself.
Fame had not made her bigger. It had made her fewer. Every new follower was one more person who knew the poster, and I, the one person who knew the girl, had quietly walked away and called it protecting my peace. Months later I would write about that specific loneliness, the crowded kind, but that night all I could do was confess.
"I muted you in April," I said.
There was a pause long enough to end a friendship.
Then she laughed until the hiccups came back.
"I know," she said. "You stopped liking my posts within nine seconds. You used to be my fastest like. You think I didn't notice? I notice you the way you notice me."
We stayed on the phone until four. Not about the book. About the hostel warden who confiscated our kettle. About the boy with the guitar and one chord. About her grandmother, the actual woman, not the poem, who once chased a cow out of the courtyard with a rolled newspaper and an insult so precise we still quote it. In the morning I watched her interview from my couch. They asked the grandmother question. She answered with a brand new poem instead, and looked straight down the camera while she did it, and I whooped alone in my living room like a person watching cricket.
We repaired slowly, the way you fix something you intend to keep. Fridays came back. The notebook came back, more embarrassed than we were. She sent me an essay about why safe poems lose with the subject line "this is about your weather," and she was right... it was. So I wrote one poem with my actual name in the wound, and she stood over me while I posted it to a community wall for poets, because I would not have pressed the button alone. The first comment came from an account called SaltAndMarigold. It said, "This one can be traced back to you. Finally."
I did not lose my friend to fame. I nearly lost her to the version of myself I became around it, the accountant of mentions, the drafter of formal texts. Jealousy, it turns out, is not the opposite of love. It is love with its back turned, still standing in the same room, pretending to read.
Last month her bus route changed and the poster came down. She sent me a photo of two workers peeling her giant face off the metal in long grey strips, and underneath it she wrote one word: "delaminated."
I wrote back, "Welcome home."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.