People write endlessly about heartbreak. About grief. About loss so dramatic it deserves a string section and a dimly lit music video. There are entire playlists dedicated to being wronged, abandoned, betrayed, shattered. All valid, all documented, all aggressively catered to by a streaming algorithm that assumes you’re crying in the shower.
But nobody really talks about the other kind of missing someone. The one where nobody did anything wrong. Where there was no plot twist, no betrayal, no dramatic exit. Life just wandered off. You took a left turn, they took a right, and eight months later you’re staring at your phone thinking, Huh. So that’s the last message. Interesting.
This kind of missing someone is weird. It’s quiet. It’s not even tragic. It’s just… there. Like a sock you lost in the laundry but somehow still think about. It sneaks up on you in the most mundane moments. You’re cleaning your phone storage, because apparently that’s adulthood now. You stumble on a picture from years ago. There they are, laughing at something you don’t even remember. And you pause, like you’ve just discovered an artifact from the era known as ‘When We Actually Spoke.’ You scroll through old texts which is an emotional time travel except you’re the only one who didn’t get the memo about the return trip.
You tell yourself you’re busy. You tell yourself life moved on. You tell yourself it’s fine. And it is fine, mostly. Except for those tiny moments when you think to reach out and it feels bizarre, what do you even say? Hey, remember when we used to talk? Wild times.
Hey, sorry I forgot you existed for most of a year. It feels ridiculous. Like trying to reboot a show that ended without a finale.
So you do the next best thing. You talk about them to someone else. You say things like, “We didn’t fall out, we just fell apart geographically.” Or you write about them, because writing is the one place where you can say everything without worrying about whether it’s weird. Or you draw something, even if it looks like a potato with feelings. At least the potato understands.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, that Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton line drifts in, You can’t make old friends. You don’t even need the whole song. That one line does all the heavy lifting. It’s like an emotional CrossFit.
It’s annoyingly true. You can make new friends, sure. You can meet wonderful people who fit into your life beautifully. But you can’t recreate the specific, chaotic, irreplaceable history of someone who knew you back when your eyebrows were questionable and your life choices were worse.
Old friends are a category of their own. They are like a hand stitched quilt your grandmother made, not always on the bed, never getting thrown out, and somehow always exactly where you left it.
So where do you land with all this? Not in resolution. Not in some tidy moral about reaching out or letting go. Just somewhere honest.
You carry them. Even if you don’t talk. Even if the last message is eight months old. Even if life drifted and nobody steered. Some people just live in you, whether they’re in your life or not. They become part of your internal landscape, like a landmark you don’t visit but still use to navigate.
And maybe that’s enough. Or maybe it’s not. But at least it’s true.
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Ajita’s Headspace was born from ruminations and memories finding
their way out through storytelling.
The author is an artist and designer based in the tri-state area.
