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| Art Card by Samantha Viray |
Life moving on is the hardest part when you hold on too much.
There is this close friend of mine who I haven’t spoken to in a long time, and to be honest, I occasionally think about what would be the first thing I tell them after not seeing each other for so long.
The situation would always play in my head: My friend and I, face-to-face, while the silence conjures too much awkwardness, and we’d just end up staring at each other, not knowing what to say.
I’ve run this scenario in my mind hundreds of times, replaying it again and again, yet I could never figure out what would be the first thing I’d honestly say. If we were once so close, why has this become so difficult? I could never have imagined that it would end up this way, as we used to do everything together. It was brutal to me how our circumstances can change the dynamic of a friendship. What I once thought was something of permanence turned out to be almost non-existent a few years later.
If we spoke again tomorrow, I wonder if our dynamic would be the same? Or would we be complete strangers, where meeting each other again would feel more awkward rather than something that I would cherish? Back then, I felt reassured that someone had my back whenever we experienced the same hardships. We dealt with the same difficult tasks together, and it made the experience more tolerable than dealing with it alone. But now that we’ve drifted apart from each other, I began to ask myself, who do I now turn to?
I still do not know how to fully deal with the situation, but I've learned to move past the hurt that I carried compared to when I first realized that things were becoming distant. Grieving the friendship never fully went away, but I’ve learned to accept that life really moves in ways that we do not understand.
Right now, I’m going through a phase where everything is moving too quickly. A lot of these memories and relationships are visitors that I try to hold onto. Without them, I wouldn’t know what would make life worth living, but life is an ever-evolving project where we are made up of those who contribute to our experiences.
