To  the friend I couldn't keep

Hello, old friend. It’s been quite a while. I heard you got married this year. I couldn’t bring myself to reach out, ask how you’ve been, congratulate you, and wish you so much luck for every new chapter in your life, every milestone you’ve crossed since we last met all those lifetimes ago. Any message I sent now would probably feel like an afterthought. No, I never lost your contact number, it’s still saved on my phone. Somehow, whenever your name pops up on my social media, it feels foreign… like I’ve suddenly stirred up an untouched memory of a place I once knew, but only as a child so all I remember is hazy and dreamlike glimpses and fill in the gaps by using my imagination. 

I still think there is a hint of familiarity that lies underneath the currents of separation, but the message boxes have remained vacant for so long, it almost feels like every effort to reopen the portal and jump back in would come off as superficial at best. Would we still be able to talk as we did when we were younger, when the world hadn’t yet revealed its true nature to us, and life had felt relatively simpler? Or would there be a barrier to cross, the obvious question of “what’s been going on in your life?” to maybe bridge the gap and erect a new foundation with more vulnerability than before. Is it worth the effort to rekindle the magic that once sealed our destiny to be friends in that one phase of our lives?

When you’re a child, most friendships don’t come with complicated strings attached. You choose someone  and they choose you. All it takes is shared pencil sharpeners and two toothy grins; and you decide to sit together for the rest of the school year because that is your favorite person from now onward. There are no prejudices in childhood, you see your friends everyday, you study with them and you all play together. They take a sick day and suddenly, you feel like the loneliest kid on Earth. It’s that simple. Childhood bonds strengthen by repeated associations.

Friendships in adulthood aren’t like that. As an adult, we don’t see our friends for months at a time, everyone chooses their unique paths in university; you all branch out, make new connections in universities; once you graduate scheduling gatherings is even harder because nobody is on the same page, the work life balance doesn’t match up, we’re handling career and families side by side, the commute time from one’s place to another gets in the way, there’s so much more labor that comes with adulthood; all those things that didn’t exist when we were younger crop up the moment you step into each new chapter.

You can’t keep up with everyone, if you want to keep up with your own life. 

And so the pursuit of your goals comes at the expense of many friendships. They don’t always end because of misunderstandings and messy blowups. Sometimes, the friendship has just run its course. Some friendships fade because they never reached the depth beyond what was common in the moments you shared with each other, before they were driven to the test of time; some fade because they were born out of close proximity but once the proximity ended so did the friendship; and some end because they weren’t friendships, only coincidental associations and because people tend to grow in different directions from each other.

Ours is a world where nothing can remain static, life is in constant motion, we are changing faster than we know it ourselves, I have not been careful, in this process of finding myself I’ve let slip through the cracks many people I used to know; sometimes it was indeed for the better, other times life just happened for everyone. It’s never intentional though. You move on from a place, and you end up outgrowing that version of yourself and the memories that were attached to that part of you dwindle over time. Maybe we got too busy holding the fort up for ourselves as we traversed through life, and once we returned to the spot that was once ours, it no longer felt like home. It wasn’t the fault of anyone. And now I know, it’s better to be all but a familiar face in the sea of someone’s oblivion than to cling to an ideal life where all the friends you made in life, you kept. I’ll still love you, like we love old photographs of eras that have passed us by, and know that if I happen to see you on the street, I'd rush to meet you with the same joy from all those years ago. 

Yours truly,

Someone who’ll always wish you well