Life is full of many interesting concepts – love, religion, the unconscious mind, death, etc. People ponder these concepts until the wee hours of the night and sometimes, dedicate their entire lives to understanding them. I am no different. Recently I have been thinking about a specific aspect of life: when former friends/lovers/family members regress back to the stage of never knowing each other. The stage of being strangers. It’s interesting, unfortunate, yet extremely common.

When two people meet for the first time and they instantly click, there’s no greater feeling. You wonder “where have they been my whole life?” You decide you need each other in your lives and begin to develop an unbreakable bond.

Unfortunately, life happens and it can cause people to drift apart, have a falling out, break up, or move away. The idea that someone who you once shared everything with can become a complete stranger, is nauseating. When its due to a break up or falling out, you feel worthless, expendable and sometimes even dumb. You wonder how you will move on without them.

It’s an interesting concept really. The process of how we make people who used to be everything back into nothing. It’s interesting how we learn to forget or how we’re forgotten. If you think about it, we technically never really stop knowing them, we just try forget that we ever did. When our lives once revolved around someone, it doesn’t just stop automatically. They flood our memories and fill our heads. For example, do you ever really forget their birthdays or favorite movie? Do you forget your anniversaries? Do the promises you made become neutralized?

Now I don’t necessarily want to believe that we ignore each other because we just “feel like it” and they don’t matter anymore. No, I want to believe it’s done out of necessity. Love isn’t expendable, but our sanity is.

So at the end of the day, we all start out as strangers and we can choose who we get to know, but I think we sometimes forget that we can’t usually choose who ends up a stranger again.