Old Film Reels

The phantom limb of friendship. It’s a strange, aching kind of loss, this severance from people who are still very much alive. Not a death, but a quiet, slow fading. A ghosting without the dramatic exit. They exist, somewhere out there, breathing, laughing, living, but no longer within the orbit of my daily existence.

I find myself sometimes, unexpectedly, reaching for them in the recesses of my memory. A shared joke, a late-night conversation, a road trip with the windows down and the music blaring – these moments, once vibrant and present, now flicker like old film reels. They hold a warmth, a nostalgia, a bittersweet ache that reminds me of what was.

The reasons for this drift are varied, a tapestry woven with threads of distance, divergent paths, and slow, insidious erosion of time. Sometimes, it’s the physical distance that stretches between us, making casual connection a logistical challenge. Sometimes, it’s the subtle shifts in our inner landscapes, the widening gulf of differing perspectives, the quiet divergence of political or emotional landscapes that create an unbridgeable chasm.

There’s a strange kind of grief in knowing that the person I knew, the person I shared those moments with, may no longer exist in the same way. We all change, evolve, reshape ourselves with the passing years. The shared history, the common language we once spoke, becomes a relic of a past version of ourselves.

I wonder if they think of me too, occasionally. Do they stumble upon a memory, a shared song, a familiar scent, and feel that same pang of recognition? Do they also grapple with the understanding that the “us” we were is now a phantom, a whisper of what once was?

There’s a temptation to assign blame, to dissect the “what if’s” and “could have beens” to search for the precise moment the thread began to fray. But ultimately, I find more peace in acceptance. Life is a river, constantly flowing, carrying us along its currents. Some people walk alongside us for a stretch, their presence a bright, comforting constant. Others are fleeting glimpses, figures on the riverbank, waving as we pass.

I choose to hold onto the good, the shared joy, the lessons learned. I choose to honor the space they occupied in my life, even if the space is now filled with the quiet echo of their absence. They remain a part of my story, a chapter written in the vibrant ink of shared experience. And perhaps, in some distant future, our paths might converge again, not to recreate the past, but to acknowledge the shared history, to recognize the echoes of what once was, and to find a new way to connect, if only for a brief, fleeting moment, across the vast expanse of time and change.