Disappointment Factory

⟢ "We used to talk every day. I don't know when that stopped. I don't know which one of us let go first."

⟢ "I miss you and you're right there and that's somehow the loneliest thing I've ever felt."

⟢ "We grew in different directions and nobody did anything wrong and it still feels like losing something."

⟢ "I saw a photo of us from four years ago and I don't recognize either of those people anymore."

⟢ "You know me in a way nobody current does and someday that's just going to be a fact I carry."

⟢ "I keep meaning to call. I think you keep meaning to call. We're very good at meaning to."

⟢ "You were my person for a decade. I don't know what the word is for what you are now."

⟢ "I heard something funny the other day and I thought of you first and then remembered and put my phone back down."

⟢ "We just--stopped. Like a clock that nobody noticed had run down."

⟢ "I think we held on past the point where it was working because we both loved who we used to be to each other."

⟢ "You were at my worst and my best and now you're just, someone I used to know, and that doesn't feel like enough of a word."

⟢ "I don't know if I should reach out. I don't know if you want me to. I don't know when we became people who don't know that about each other."

⟢ "I think we made each other into who we are and then outgrew each other and I don't know if that's beautiful or devastating."

⟢ "The friendship I thought we'd have forever quietly became a friendship I have in past tense."

⟢ "I wish there had been a fight. Something to point at. Instead there was just--less and less, until nothing."

⟢ "I'm glad you're doing well. I mean that. I just wish I heard it from you."

⟢ "We were the kind of friends who didn't need to explain ourselves to each other. I miss being known like that."

⟢ "You're living a whole life I'm not part of and I had to find that out from someone else and I didn't know it would hit like that."

⟢ "I think about calling you when something big happens. And then I remember we're not that anymore. And I sit with that for a while."

⟢ "Nobody tells you that some friendships just quietly die. That there's no funeral. Just absence."

⟢ "We were so good together once. Maybe that's enough. Maybe that has to be enough."

⟢ "I don't want to be strangers. I just don't know how to be what we were. I don't know if that place still exists."

⟢ "I think losing you taught me more about grief than any actual loss I've had. That feels important somehow."

on survival