It’s been a week since we had our text fight, and I know I should probably be the one to suck it up and apologize, but every fiber of my being is telling me not to break. There’s a certain power in not writing back. A certain power in knowing she’s probably checking her phone, wondering why I haven’t reached out, wondering if we’ll ever talk again. And I’m not ready to release her from friendship purgatory.

We used to always celebrate Valentine’s Day together, but I didn’t even text her yesterday, and I ate all the conversation heart cookies that my parents were going to drop off at her place. When Julia and Elena asked why we didn’t even FaceTime to commemorate the holiday, I told them Parisa was too busy with her college applications. If I had been honest, they’d probably just spout some AA advice and tell me to surrender to my higher power. Whenever they bring up the G-word, I tend to zone out or covertly roll my eyes. Don’t people understand that if they let Jesus take the wheel, they’d crash into the car in front of them? And shouldn’t God be nonbinary? Hasn’t the time come to change his pronouns to them/they?

Despite staying tight-lipped on the topic, my moms still suspected we might be in a fight and brought up their favorite AA slogan anyway: Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Sure, it’s a catchy one, but it also feels a little empty coming from people who haven’t talked to their own parents in twenty-five years. Also, I’m not exactly sure which one of us is drinking the poison here. Me or Parisa? Maybe we’re slowly killing each other.

I try to remind myself that the tone and content of Parisa’s texts came from a place of guilt. I obviously struck a nerve. And maybe I was being a touch condescending. But deep down, she knows that her friendship with Gideon is inappropriate, and she lashed out at me for pointing it out. And regardless of how I feel about Neda (stuck-up, entitled, self-involved, the list goes on), I wasn’t going to encourage my best friend to pursue some twisted affair with her sister’s boyfriend. You don’t have to be Harvard bound to know that won’t end well. But instead of taking any accountability for her actions, Parisa did what she always does. She made herself the victim.