I shouldn’t be blogging today. I’m too occupied with my teaching tasks. I said many times before that this is the part of teaching I hate. Checking papers, tracing deficiencies, and encoding grades. I should be working but in the middle of the working day, I received a very sad news.
My lone best friend at the workplace is leaving.
She is tendering her resignation less than a month from now. When my best friend uttered the words, “mag-re-resign na ako,” it felt like my heart stopped beating. I was drowned by the fact that she is leaving and I’m left behind. I held my tears, I smiled but deep inside, I’m weeping.
I met my best friend at the workplace in 2005. I joined the Research team a year ahead of her. Back then, there were usually 4 to 5 people that form the Research Team. Over time, our colleagues eventually found better lives and career in other companies. We ended as the remaining members of the original Research Team. Years after, I was one of those employees affected by the job rotation. I was transferred to Corporate Planning under a great boss. My separation with my best friend entailed working two doors away from her place. Call me too emotional and sensitive, but that separation already gave me months of adjustment. I was looking forward for lunch breaks because that was the only time we were together.
Oftentimes, I rant and my best friend would patiently listen. We would share gossips and laugh out the silliest things at the workplace. I was living and enjoying the same routine for SEVEN YEARS. I was having lunch with the same person everyday… for seven years. We would alternately eat at the school canteen, Jollibee, Greenwich, Chow King, Chicken Bacolod to the cheapest snack houses outside the school. Those lunches made my growing up years as a uniformed corporate slave.
And this day, my seven years would change in less than a month….
I’m not just losing a lunch buddy. I’m losing a best friend. I’m losing a part of myself. Just when half of my life is unstable and I’m being attacked by my quarter life crisis again, one of my security blankets is taken away..