THE PEOPLE I OUTGREW

Letter 018 NEW

We Didn’t Have a Falling Out. We Just Fell Out.

There isn't a story.

That's almost what makes this harder to explain.

You didn't betray me.

I didn't finally have enough.

Nobody slammed a door.

Nobody said goodbye.

We just stopped being us.

I don't know when it happened.

There wasn't a last conversation that felt like a last conversation.

There wasn't a fight I can replay and point to and say,

There. That's where we lost each other.

There were just smaller things.

A text I meant to answer later.

A call you didn't return.

Plans we genuinely wanted to make.

We should get together soon.

I miss you.

It's been forever.

We meant all of it.

And somehow forever kept getting longer.

One day I realized I knew more about your life from a screen than I did from you.

And that was strange.

Because once, I knew everything.

I knew the person you were dating before everyone else did.

I knew when I'm fine meant absolutely nothing of the sort.

I knew your stories well enough to interrupt you while you were telling them.

You knew mine too.

There are jokes I can't properly explain anymore because explaining them would require explaining an entire version of my life.

You were there for that version.

That's what makes old friendships so strange.

Sometimes the person disappears but their fingerprints are everywhere.

A phrase I still use.

A place I still think of as ours.

A story I've told so many times that your part in it has become part of my own mythology.

And there was no ending.

We just became people who used to know each other.

I wonder if you noticed it happening.

Maybe you had the same realization I did.

Maybe one day you saw something that reminded you of me, reached for your phone, and then thought:

Would it be weird if I sent this now?

That's such a strange distance to travel with someone.

From telling them absolutely everything

to wondering whether you're still allowed to send them something stupid.

Neither of us decided to go there.

We just arrived.

Some relationships don't end. They become past tense so slowly you don't notice the grammar changing.

I think I used to believe losing someone required somebody to be responsible.

Someone left.

Someone hurt someone.

Someone stopped trying.

Someone could have fixed it.

But I don't know who to blame for us.

Maybe nobody.

Maybe life got bigger.

Maybe our worlds moved in different directions.

Maybe the versions of ourselves who needed each other so much simply became people with different lives.

And maybe that's allowed to be sad without being wrong.

I don't wish we'd stayed exactly the same.

I wouldn't want either of us to have remained the people we were just so we could keep fitting perfectly into each other's lives.

We were supposed to change.

We did.

I just didn't realize changing might cost me you.

And I don't know if I want to fix it.

That's probably the strangest thing to admit.

Because missing something doesn't always mean you should go back for it.

Sometimes I miss us without knowing whether the people we are now would even become friends.

Maybe we would.

I'd like to think so.

But maybe what I'm actually missing is being known by someone who was there.

Someone I didn't have to give the backstory to.

Someone who remembers the old house.

The old joke.

The old heartbreak.

The old me.

There are people in my life now who know me deeply.

But they know me from the chapter where they arrived.

You knew the chapters I don't live in anymore.

And I'll always love you a little for that.

Not in a way that asks anything from you.

Not in a way that needs us to become what we were.

Just in the quiet way you can love someone who helped make a version of you that no longer exists.

Maybe someday one of us will send the stupid thing.

Maybe we'll get coffee.

Maybe we'll laugh for three hours and wonder why we ever let so much time pass.

Or maybe we won't.

Maybe this is all we were supposed to be.

Two people who knew each other incredibly well

for a while.

I used to think that if something mattered, it had to last.

I don't anymore.

You mattered.

We mattered.

And the fact that we didn't stay doesn't get to rewrite that.

We didn't have a falling out.

We just fell out.

And somehow,

I think I'm finally okay with not needing anyone to be at fault.