Wonder how one who you knew everything about can just gradually disappear. One day you are enjoying a beautiful time with them, laughing, sharing conceits, looking ahead to your lives and then one moment later, you are passing each other by as you were never in the same tale. It seems unnatural at first but it occurs regularly and more than we are willing to say. Friends may become strangers and that is a traumatic alteration that leaves its own silence.
When you are in the process of friendship it feels like forever. The conversations at odd hours, the secret code-language used, the intimacy of someone who knows you well without having to say it--it seems indestructible. Yet life changes. There are people maturing, circumstances shifting and the relationship fails to evolve with them. Not every time it is betrayal or grand fight. Latent many times it is difference in distance or themselves breaking ground. It is the force of the choices of divergent directions.
The most difficult aspect however is the fact that the person that you were formerly close to no longer understands you in the time that you need them. You may still scroll through the past communication and think how it all went amiss. You could also find yourself in the situation of feeling tempted to send some random message to a person but you stop yourself because the bond has become too tenuous. That reluctance is a message to you, something significant went away the intimacy you once had.
The situation of loss of friend is not comparable to other relationships such as romance. We are allowed to mourn breakups by society, but the feeling of drifting apart with friends is, however, treated as something normal. People will mention that it is the way it is when growing up but that does not make the ache less physical. A good friend also becomes a part of yourself and when you lose that person you feel yourself without a part.
I suppose it is the silence that is killing. The fact that a stranger does not talk to you anymore, is nothing. It hurts more when a person once says he/she will never leave goes silent. You run tapes, in an attempt to determine what went wrong. Aren t I saying something? Have I gone too far? Or it is that they simply grew out of me? There is not an always clear-cut answer and you are forced to deal with love and disappointment simultaneously.
Nonetheless, there is some weird beauty to the cycle of friendship. Anyone who ever enters your life leaves an imprint. Even though they are not around you at this moment, the laughs, the teachings and the good feelings you once shared are there! They somehow formed you and that you may not even realize until later. Perhaps that is where the point lies. Some friends are not supposed to last long in life but every friend helps you to know more about yourself.
It is also times of acceptance. You find out that you do not have a permanent claim on people. The once friend who is an outsider now may still be thinking about you once in a while the same way that you are thinking about him or her. They may grin over a memory of the past as you do. The association might be long dead, but the ineffect resevered. And perhaps that is all.
What then do you do with friends who have become strangers? You cry and do not stuff up the fact that there has been a person who meant something to you and you lost that person. And yet you go on too. You expose yourself to fresh affiliation, fresh amusement, fresh relationships that may linger or may dwindle away the same. It is this lack of certainty that is also a part of the value of friendship because it is not concrete, but it becomes concrete at the time.
It is a book of chapters and not all the characters are supposed to be present until the last page. Others are mentioned only to pop in and out of a couple of pages, but they nonetheless help to enrich the plot. When friends turn into strangers then make it an effort to recall the good rather than holding to the loss. In a sense, they would never really be far off even when they are no longer beside you.
