Life has definitive stages and growing up, we always heard from our parents that you will lose friends and you will gain them and life will ultimately move on. Never has a sentence in my life brought such sadness and I was always anxiously waiting for that moment in life when that prophecy of lost friends would come to pass.

I'm at the point in life where change is on the brink of occurring and new and exciting things are occurring. I'm also beginning to notice that as the opportunities are growing, the circle around me is diminishing and I feel a sort of helpless watching it happen.

I don't want to lose anyone, and I don't want those who I hold so dear in my heart to walk away. I understand that our lives are changing and that in order to grow, I might have to let people go, but why does such incredible change have to begin with such heartbreak?

You might call me naïve and you might say that I need to learn to adapt to change but all I see are changes in my life that I am not ready for. I'm ready for my life to progress and to move on to bigger and better things, but that moment when the 3 AM phone calls stop, and normal conversations become tense, that is when the heartbreak begins for me because someone so special in my life is now a stranger.

I always thought a stranger was somebody you didn't know. My mom always warned me about them. What I didn't realize was that someone who was like a sister to me is now someone I don't know.

The hardest part of all is when I become excited to tell them something; some amazing event in my life and when I go to pick the phone up to dial their number, I am filled with a sharp pain of sadness that they won't pick up and as I lay the phone down, I think that this person who has become a stranger in my life is the person I want to talk to the most and they aren't there.

Life has it fulfilling parts, but it also has the parts that threaten to break us, and we are told to push on because it will ultimately strengthen us. I just wish we didn't have to lose people in order to grow. I wish you were still in my life and I wish I could tell you all this.

But you are a stranger and I am a stranger and we no longer know each other.