The people who anchored you before you were anyone deserve more than your leftover minutes.
I haven't talked to my best friend from high school in two years and we're not in a fight.
We just stopped. Slowly. The way a relationship dies when neither person did anything wrong.
He texts. I see it on my phone in some airport. I think "I'll respond when I land." I land. I'm tired. I think "I'll respond tomorrow." Tomorrow I'm in a new time zone and the text is buried under six others and answering it now feels weird because too much time has passed. So I don't.
Three weeks go by. Then six. Then a year.
This is the friend who slept on my couch for two months when his marriage fell apart. Who drove four hours to be at my dad's surgery. Who knew me before I had anything to prove.
And I let him slip because I was busy being free in another country.
That's the trap. You build a life that lets you go anywhere and do anything, and the people who anchored you back when you were nobody get treated like maintenance you'll get to eventually. They don't make it onto the calendar because there is no calendar. They don't get a recurring slot because nothing is recurring. They just float in the same fog as everything else you'll handle when you have a minute.
You never have a minute. The minute is the whole problem.
When I had the logistics company, I had structure forced on me. I was in the same city. I went to the same coffee shop. My friends knew where to find me. We didn't plan hangouts. We collided. Saturday at the bar. Sunday at someone's apartment watching a game. Tuesday because his car broke down and he needed a ride.
Friendship survived on proximity and accidents. Neither of which exist in my life anymore.
You've felt this. Maybe you moved cities for a job and told yourself you'd fly back for the important stuff. You haven't. Maybe you went freelance and stopped seeing the work friends who used to be actual friends. Maybe you got into a relationship that became your whole social life and three years later you couldn't name five people who'd show up if something went wrong.
It didn't happen in a moment. That's why it's hard to see. Nobody got dropped. Nobody got chosen against. The drift just kept drifting because nothing was holding it in place.
I called him a few weeks ago. From a hostel in Mexico City. Took me four tries to actually hit dial because I felt like an asshole. He picked up on the second ring. Said "well, look who's alive." Not mean. Just true.
We talked for an hour and a half. I learned his mom had a cancer scare last spring. He learned I'd been to a wedding he didn't know I'd been invited to. By the end of the call I was sitting on the floor of my hostel room with a knot in my throat trying to figure out how I'd let that much life happen to him without me in it.
He didn't make me feel bad. That was almost worse. He'd just adjusted. Filed me under "we'll catch up eventually." The way I'd filed him.
I don't have a system for this now. I tried the scheduled-friendship thing. Reminders. Monthly calls. It felt like a chore and the calls were bad because they were performed.
What I do instead is dumb. When someone crosses my mind, I call them right then. Not text. Call. Most of the time they don't pick up. I leave a rambling voicemail. Sometimes they call back that day. Sometimes a week later. Sometimes they text "saw this, miss you" and that's the whole thing.
It's not a relationship strategy. It's just refusing to let the impulse die in my pocket.
The freedom I built was supposed to give me more time for the people I love. What it actually did was remove every external reason I had to show up for them. And it turns out I'm not as good a friend as I thought I was when the world wasn't forcing me to be one.
The cost of going anywhere is that nobody's expecting you anywhere.
— Best, Jose
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