…I love you like a sister, even though you’re not my sister.
- Atmosphere
Losing friends is difficult, painful, and never gets easier no matter how old we get. Sometimes friends decide to walk away from the friendship. Sometimes friends decide they no longer have room at the table for you. Sometimes you find yourself on a bridge overlooking the water standing completely alone.
You can build the greatest bridges but all things eventually fade. I can’t recall where I heard the phrase “Seasonal Friendships” in my late 20’s but, as I’ve gotten older and now into my 30’s, I’ve come to appreciate the idea. In a sentence, it means that all friendships come and go as the weather, ebb and flow as the oceans, rise and fall as the mountains and the valleys. Some of these friendships are summery and green, while others are earth-shattering thunderstorms.
For much longer than I can remember, and longer than seasonal friendships, I’ve held a philosophy that we live a life as a river flows water. Our lives ebb and flow with seasonal shifts that take our course in different directions. Everyone is a river that runs parallel, crosses, merges, splits, and eventually runs to the seas and oceans to join the great cosmos. Throughout life we build relationships that can feed and drain our own rivers. Romantic relationships and friendships are slightly different rivers, but they too run parallel, cross, merge, split, and still eventually join the collective human experience.
For friendships, I’ve found the rivers to have much tamer and calmer waters. These waters and rivers have flowed for me with abundant love and memories. I am very fortunate and thankful for the many friendships that have joined my river over the years. Losing them has truly felt like removing a portion of my soul, and it has never gotten easier. I’ve lost friends to suicide, drugs, alcohol, my own sobriety, and some that have decided I no longer have a place in their life.
I’ve written previously about accepting and understanding the places that people hold for you in their lives. These may not always be the place we hope, but that isn’t under our control. We can’t control the course and direction of someone’s river any more than we can control the wind, the rain, the lightning, the thunder. We can’t control someone leaving our life, or their own either for that matter.
So, here I sit, teary-eyed and stoned thinking of the best friends I’ve lost and continue to lose. I feel tears stream down my cheeks thinking of the friends that would comfort me now if they were here, or I there. I seek solace in vinyl records and chai tea in my solitude at 3 in the morning.
I take off my glasses, wipe the salty water from my face, and struggle to make sense of it all. I know we aren’t meant to understand all of it, but that’s part of the whole joke. I see rivers diverging and have tried so hard to shore up the banks of the waters rushing beneath the bridge. If society has learned nothing else, the Grand Canyon stands as a great metaphorical reality that water will wash way even the hardest of rocks and stone.
Fuck. I really want to end this on some great grandiose lesson or point, but I guess I’m still trying to find my own meaning for it all. I miss my friends and wish I had another chance to talk to some of them. If you’re reading this, I probably miss you too. I know you may never read this, but still know, I’ll miss you for all of my days. Friendships fade as the sunshine turns to nightshade. The weather passes. The season changes.
