Growing up with the same person by your side, day in and day out, comes with the harsh reality that one day, all you have created together will be gone.
All of the midnight phone calls and sleepovers and the gross foods you used to make together. All of the days spent planning where you were going to buy your future apartment one day.
At a certain point, it no longer seems fun to hang out with them anymore; conversations seem abrupt, stories get shorter and memories come to a close.
Friendships are much more fragile than relationships. There is a connection that was created from love and healing way before you knew you were ready to settle down into a relationship. The youngest years of your life with them taught you who you really are and the person you want to become. You see her start to hang out with new people, different from the people she has come to know. It feels like you're dealing with a stranger, and it's upsetting. You don't know how to make things better or if you even can.
It's harder to make connections with new people because you compare all of your future friendships to the one which made you laugh and cry simultaneously. You might even shut yourself off from other people because you are frustrated and don't know where else to turn to.
When they're gone, it feels like maybe this was the right thing to do. There is a different angle that makes the situation slightly different than before, and that angle is circumstance. Going off to college, meeting new people, maybe even a change of mindset. It may or may not be gone, but the way I see it is that even though the friendship is over, you took out of it a lot more than you thought you would have. You learned yourself a little bit better and how to bond with other people. Maybe you even learned to love yourself a little more from all of the love that they have showed you.
It's easy to feel resentful, it's best just to wish them well and move on. There is no point trying to relive a time in your life, because honestly, growing up is hard. We need to meet new people and have new experiences in order to grow. Sometimes, we even grow out of our closest friendships, and that's OK.
Everything changes, and it's important to embrace this constantly. You were made to create a part of their life that was meant to happen for a moment, even as brief as it was. It's one of the hardest things in life to watch someone who made you grow into who you are, suddenly branch off and create their own being. But the reality is, that's what we were born to do. And if we love them, we should want them to be happy, even if it means that they grow away from us, instead of closer.
