Dear You,
I am finally writing my goodbye letter.
Sometimes there’s no huge fight that marks the end of a friendship. No falling out, no major disagreement. Sometimes it just falls apart for no good reason. Distance. New relationships. Priorities. Somehow these things can become more important than your connection; they shouldn’t but they do. And as we get older we tend to downsize, prioritize. Trim the corners of our lives, keeping what’s important and discarding what isn’t. Sometimes we stop needing people in our lives and it isn’t even conscious. There comes a time in our lives where all of us wake up and realize that it’s time for us to grow up and accept the so called “adult” way of living. The time when we finally get our life together and forget the way of living back when we were below the age of eighteen. No one wakes up in the morning actively thinking “Hmm, I think I’ll stop being friends with so-and-so today.” It just goes out with an empty fizz, like a cigarette hitting the bottom of a Coke can.
Friendship is a special kind of love that’s not supposed to fade. You never expect the one person you thought you could always depend on to disappear without saying goodbye. And when they do you feel sickeningly stupid and cheated, wondering what you meant to them all along, whether you were just convenient or in the right place at the right time. You never really know for sure.
You look through pictures from back when you were happy — holding each other up drunk and ecstatic, working on projects on a rainy Sunday afternoon — and can’t understand what happened. I think back to the times I held you while you cried, the times I made you smile in times of heartbreak. And the worst part is, I don’t even know how to explain myself. I know if I bring this up with you you’ll give me a blank expression and a blank excuse. I don’t want to explain how I feel. I can’t. I just want you to get it, to read me like you used to be able to. I want to take you by the shoulders and shake you, screaming Where are you? What happened? Until you’re blue in the face. But I can’t do that either.
In life, it’s a given that you will lose people. People will flow in and out like curtains through an open window, sometimes for no reason at all. But losing someone important to you will feel like a sucker punch every single time, and you’ll never see it coming. Which makes the friendships that do hold out, the ones that make it through countless breakdowns and breakthroughs and changes and years, that much more important.
I now realize that our friendship was simply just convenient to you and I have accepted that fact. For the last few months of our friendship, you treated me like a backup friend. And although I miss all of these memories, and I miss being able to make new ones with you, I know you're a different person now.
I may have stooped to an immature level by unfollowing you on social media, but a part of me did it out of hope. Hope that you would contact me, hope that I would receive a text saying "Hey, I think its time we talked". But that never happened and it proved so much to me.
I want to end this goodbye with a thank you. Thank you for teaching me not to chase people. The right people who belong in my life will come to me, and stay. Thank you for making me realize that sometimes you have to give up on people. Not because you don't care, but because they don't. Thank you for your friendship; even if it was just for a short while.
Sincerely, but not as fondly as before,
Jac
