Is it better to be alone than to keep bad company?

I was jittery and paranoid constantly; I was scared of the fact I might let my secret slip out. I was scared of what would happen if I did, and I was scared that I wouldn't care. I was just scared.
In the end, my inside showed on my outside. I told her the secret. I confided in my best friend that we were faulty. She called me awful things, I was a disloyal bitch and a liar - and I was. I hadn't been honest. But I needed to hear those things to know I was doing right, and she needed to say them, if only to confirm that we had separated and that our path had forked. I would go on one way, she the other. Our hands were clasped right up until the last second, but we had fallen out of step a long time before. It took the precise cruelty borne of the utterly complete link between us to inspire the realisation. She and I knew which buttons to press in each other to make that link more and more tenuous until it severed. That was our relationship: in the end our blessing bit us back.