I haven’t always been great at maintaining my friendships. At this very moment, a series of messages from my good friend Grace is sitting, ignored, in WhatsApp, awaiting the moment when I have enough “headspace” to reply. Which is just an excuse for laziness, really.
Then there are those friends I’d quite like to message, but can’t—or won’t. These are the drifters: the people who somehow slid out of view as our lives took different paths. They moved away, or we found ourselves overwhelmed by family commitments and work. Others, well, I’m really not sure what happened. But what I do know is that I’m not alone—it’s a side effect of getting older for most of us; that sad fizzling out, as priorities shift and time marches on.
There’s Jill, the school friend who was always much cooler than me and feels like my platonic “one who got away.” Zara, an old work pal with whom I was close, until I inexplicably wasn’t. Lila, who had her babies early, at a point when my fragile twenty-something ego couldn’t handle the disruption it caused to our social life. All out there, doing their own thing, about which I know nothing—even though I remember when they lost their virginities and the details of their office flings. It’s weird.
Of course, many people are destined to only play a cameo in our lives, and that’s OK. Some friendships don’t end well and are probably best left in the past (hello, college housemates). But there are others that still sting with regret and confusion at how easily we let the drift happen—or which we’re worried are falling apart right now, but are too fearful to do anything about it.
