Why do the forever friends of our 20s become strangers in our 30s?
· Scroll
I can name 11 cities I have lived in, but not even half the people who made them liveable.
Visit newsbetting.club for more information.
Somewhere in a drawer is an old SIM card with 200 phone numbers, and all I remember are names or just faces. Sometimes a vague detail surfaces: the flatmate who ate the crust of the bread first; the friend who could not sleep without the fan on, even in December, and who once made me sit through three hours of a film he loved; the friend who knew every bus route in a city I have not returned to in nine years.
In your 20s, everyone you meet seems like a permanent friend, when proximity feels like intimacy and frequency gets mistaken for love. There is that person one sees every day, whose voice you would recognise through a wall, whose kitchen you know better than your own; surely, that is the kind of life-long sentence, a good one. Surely, such a person cannot vanish from your life.
Yet, they do, and mostly without any drama.
I lost people to time, which is the ordinary way. Some I lost to death, ordinary when you’re older but unbearable when you’re younger. Some I lost to plain uncertainty: an illness, a...