“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”
-Richard Siken
everyone loses people, one way or another, in the whirlwind when life starts picking up pace and you’re far away from home. you don’t realize the loss of friends at the moment as it happens gradually as you drift away from each other out into the boundlessness of life. but when you realize it, days, weeks, months, or maybe even years later, this bone-deep ache makes a home within you. a lump in the throat and a heart heavy with memories that don’t go away quickly.
it is in those moments that you have to come to terms with the temporariness of people in your life. and you forget, and then it has to be dealt with again, and- so it goes. this temporariness, however, doesn’t mean those people, those childhood friends, weren’t significant or didn’t play a part in shaping you. they are a part of you as much as you are a part of them. you are all the people you’ve loved, all the places you’ve lived in, and all the versions of yourself you’ve had to leave behind.
childhood friends leave one by one and leave a friend-shaped hole in the fabric of your life. all the memories formed with them will haunt you like ghosts in those moments when your breath catches as if in a wind trap of remembrance. the ghosts of their childhood will forever plague you, and you will become a haunted house. it’s essential to understand that not all hauntings are terrible; some persist out of love. there comes a point in time when it feels as though your childhood has turned into a terracotta vase that slipped through your fingers and shattered on the unyielding floor, each shard bearing the name of someone you loved. the rest of your life is spent trying to piece the broken parts together to try and make sense of the seeming endlessness of childhood.
the friends you lost are now part of a language you no longer speak. as you grow in and out of various facets of life, the dialect of your life keeps changing. it is possible to get so far away from where you were that the thread connecting the now to the then snaps. the language of your childhood is dead now. no one speaks it anymore. not them. and definitely not you.
- rudraksh dange
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