The notification glowed on my screen like an accusation – her 40th birthday celebration, intimate and joyful, filled with faces I once knew so well. But I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even invited. Each scroll through Instagram felt like pressing on a bruise, the pain fresh each time: Why not me? The thought echoed in the hollow spaces where our friendship used to live.
My mind carried me back like a time machine to those precious college days, twenty-two years ago, when we were just girls really, stumbling into adulthood together. The memory of her nineteenth birthday rises up so vivid it hurts. Me, rushing through the hostel corridors at midnight, setting up clues for a treasure hunt, counting my monthly allowance down to the last rupee to buy her something special. I can still hear her delighted laughter echoing off those institutional walls, can still feel the warm glow of her happiness mixing with my pride.
We were invincible then, weren’t we? Standing at the threshold of life, certain that nothing could ever come between us.
The slow drift of lives apart
My child’s voice pulls me back to the present, and reality settles around my shoulders like a heavy cloak. The calendar on my wall is a maze of school schedules, extra-curricular class schedules, and birthday parties. Every spontaneous coffee date requires the precision planning of a military operation.
Meanwhile, she – and others from our old circle – float through life unencumbered, their time still entirely their own. They meet for impromptu brunches, plan weekend getaways, share inside jokes I’m no longer part of.
But it’s not just the logistics that have created this canyon between us. It’s the slow drift of lives moving in different directions, the gradual fading of shared experiences until we’re speaking different languages entirely.
The friend who disappeared or the one left behind?
My world is filled with school runs and skinned knees, while they’re still living in a world of last-minute plans and late-night adventures. Sometimes I wonder if they see me as the friend who disappeared, while I’m here feeling like the one left behind.
The weight of my own accountability sits heavy on my chest. Perhaps when she needed me, I wasn’t there. Maybe I could have reached out more, pushed harder against the tide of everyday responsibilities that seemed to sweep me further and further from our shared shore. It’s easier to blame the natural drift of life, but harder to face the possibility that I too played a part in this slow unravelling.
The cruellest part is that this is exactly when I need them most – in this middle place of life where everything feels both settled and terrifyingly uncertain.
The unspoken grief of losing friendships in adulthood
They say losing friends in adulthood is normal, but nobody warns you about how it feels like mourning the living – about how you carry the ghost of these friendships with you, wondering if you could have held on tighter, reached out more often, bridged the growing gap somehow. Each missed celebration, each unsent invitation feels like another small death of what we once were to each other.
Holding on to the hope of reconnection
And yet, here I am, still checking her Instagram stories, still feeling that punch in the gut when I see them all together, still hoping that somehow, someday, we might find our way back to each other. Because how do you stop missing the people who once knew all your stories, who held your secrets, who promised forever and meant it…until life got in the way?
