The Friends We Lost
We have all lost people we thought we would never lose. Especially friends. We are mentally prepared to lose the romance; it is inevitable, and somewhere deep down we know it. But with friends, that is never the case.
When you were kids playing with your close friends around your block, you never would have thought that any of you would have to move, that this game was probably the last you would ever play together, that you would all drift away from one another and most likely never meet again except on social media.
I still remember when Facebook was launched. We all went crazy because we could rediscover our lost friends on that network. That friend from school. That girl we had written off had quietly turned gorgeous, reminding us how foolish we were to have bullied her. And that acquaintance we never took seriously was thriving. Not just rediscovering friends, we could connect with them. We could see what was going on in their lives.
And yes, I belong to an era where I remember when every single platform was launched. I am thirty-six years old and I feel ancient already, so yes, I am getting older and hopefully wiser.
Gradually we realised that rediscovering friends on a social network was not the same as rebuilding those bonds. You could reach them through a screen but you could not reach them the way you once did. You lost the will to sustain those conversations.
From childhood to adulthood you accumulate a great deal of emotional baggage. People grow up and arrive at their own realisations. And so, instead of dwelling in nostalgia, we choose to move on, because what else could we have done. We are connected on those platforms, we like their photos, we watch their children grow up, but we share no real closeness the way we once did.
When someone you considered a close friend grows up to have children of their own, you naturally feel a tenderness towards them, as though they were your own. You wish you could tell them that no matter the distance between your father and me, you could always come to me.
But that is a fantasy. Things do not happen that way. Not for everyone. Not every time. The bitter pill to swallow is this: we have lost people, and we are going to lose more. Some to death, some to distance, and some simply to the act of growing up.
When you lie down and think about it, you have always encountered people from different walks of life. Some stayed, or at least tried. Some moved on to make new friends, just as you moved on to make new friends. It feels as though we cycle through people depending on which stage of life we occupy at any given moment.
This is not a failure on our part or on theirs. This is simply how life works sometimes. You are not meant to be stationary. You are meant to keep moving, because only movement brings growth. As you move, you begin to experience life more deeply, more fully, and sometimes more brutally. Those phases change you, reshape you into someone new. And that new version of you cannot always relate to who you once were.
Everyone goes through a similar transformation, and so distance is inevitable. The right approach, then, is not to live in nostalgia. You have to accept that people do not part because compatibility was lost, but because you both moved in different directions. From there, the pull gradually weakens. It is bound to.
Think about the people you are currently close to. Do you believe you will always remain close? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Was that not exactly what you thought when you were children? Sure, you might say that back then so much of life still needed to happen, whereas now you have lived enough and there is no great upheaval ahead.
We tell ourselves that in every phase of life. We are losing people, and we will continue to. A few exceptions exist. You are fortunate if you still have people from your childhood in your life; it means you have put in the work to stay together, that life was kinder to you in that respect.
As you grow older, you begin to believe there is no chance you will lose this particular set of people. And then death comes knocking.
Even if we accept this truth, what can we do about it? Probably nothing.
Except this: when you go to that gathering, when you sit with that person, do not hold back the warmth you feel. Express it, if you can. Be a little kinder to those around you. You never know if this is the last time you will enjoy their company.