My Best Friend Of 15 Years Thinks My Boyfriend Is Her Soulmate. She Crashed His Family Dinner And Refused To Leave. Am I Losing My Best Friend Or My Mind?

Grief and Healing

Two months after the restraining order was granted I was cleaning out my closet and found a shoe box full of old photos. I pulled out the stack and started flipping through pictures of Jasmine and me from high school.

There was one from homecoming sophomore year where we were both wearing terrible dresses and making silly faces at the camera. Another showed us at graduation with our arms around each other and genuine smiles that came from years of actual friendship.

I found photos from college visits where we’d explored each other’s campuses and pretended to be students there. Birthday parties and random weekend hangouts and inside jokes captured in moments that felt so normal and happy.

I sat on my bedroom floor surrounded by evidence of a friendship that used to be real and started crying. Not the angry crying from when everything was actively falling apart but the grief crying that comes when you finally accept something is gone.

The Jasmine in these photos was my best friend who helped me study for tests and listened to me complain about bad dates and knew exactly how to make me laugh when I was sad. That person didn’t exist anymore and maybe she’d been disappearing for longer than I wanted to admit.

I looked at a photo of us from middle school right after we met and wondered if there had been signs even then that I missed or if mental illness just happened sometimes without warning. My therapist kept saying I couldn’t have prevented this but sitting there with 15 years of friendship scattered around me made it hard to believe that.

My next therapy session happened 3 days after I found the photos. I told my therapist about crying over the pictures and she asked what made me sad about seeing them.

I explained that it felt like mourning someone who was still alive because the Jasmine I knew was gone but replaced by someone wearing her face who believed things that weren’t real. My therapist nodded and said, “Grief doesn’t only happen when someone dies.”

She explained that I was grieving the loss of who Jasmine used to be and the friendship we had and that was completely valid even though Jasmine was still physically alive.

I asked how I was supposed to grieve someone while also maintaining a restraining order against them and she said those two things didn’t contradict each other. She told me I could be sad about losing my friend while still protecting myself from the person she became.

I could remember the good parts of our friendship while acknowledging that continuing any relationship now would be dangerous. She said holding both of those truths at the same time was hard but necessary and it didn’t make me a bad person for choosing safety over loyalty to someone who couldn’t respect boundaries.

I left that session feeling like someone finally gave me permission to be sad without feeling guilty about the restraining order. I could miss who Jasmine was and still know that keeping her away from us was the right choice.

A week later Alex and I were making dinner at his apartment when he told me something that surprised me. He said his anxiety had decreased a lot over the past few weeks and he was sleeping through the night again instead of waking up at every sound.

I realized I’d noticed him seeming more relaxed but hadn’t connected it to the absence of constant threat. He explained that for months he’d been looking over his shoulder everywhere he went, checking his car for signs someone had been near it and dreading his commute because he never knew if Jasmine would be waiting somewhere.

Now he could go to work without scanning the parking lot first. He could go to the gym without wondering if she’d show up on the treadmill next to him. He could visit his parents without worrying about finding her on their porch.

I watched him chop vegetables with steady hands and realized how much tension he’d been carrying that I’d gotten used to seeing. His shoulders weren’t hunched anymore and he wasn’t constantly checking his phone for notifications from unknown numbers.

I told him I was glad he could breathe again and he said it made him realize how much stress we’d both been living with for months. I hadn’t thought about my own stress as much because I was focused on protecting him but hearing him describe the relief of normalcy made me notice that I felt lighter too.

We weren’t jumping at shadows anymore and that felt like getting part of our lives back. 3 months after the restraining order I met up with Myra and two other friends from our group at a coffee shop.

We’d been trying to rebuild our friendships after everything that happened with Jasmine and it was slowly starting to feel normal again. Nobody mentioned Jasmine directly but there was this understanding between us that we’d all learned something from missing the warning signs.

Myra talked about a guy she’d been dating who gave her a weird feeling and instead of ignoring it like she might have before, she asked direct questions and trusted her gut when his answers didn’t add up. Another friend mentioned that she’d been reading about manipulation tactics because she felt stupid for believing Jasmine’s different versions of events.

I realized our entire friend group had been changed by what happened and we were all more careful now about taking people at their word without evidence. We didn’t talk about Jasmine much anymore because there wasn’t anything new to say and rehashing it just made everyone uncomfortable.

But sometimes someone would reference something that happened before and we’d all have this moment of shared understanding about how different things were now. Our group had settled into a new normal that didn’t include Jasmine and probably never would again.