TheGioBlog

There is a kind of loss that isn’t talked about nearly as often as it should be.

There is no ritual for it, no clear ending, no objective explanation.

It just happens.

Friendships end too.

Or maybe they don’t truly end, but instead transform into something we can no longer recognize.

This piece is about that.

About the people who were essential to us at some point, but who, for different reasons and along different paths, no longer hold the same place in our lives.

The names here are fictional, but the stories are not.

For many years, Layla was the most tangible definition of friendship I had.

When I think about connection, presence, and consistency, she is the first person who comes to mind.

The image is still incredibly specific.

Two pigtails, blonde hair, purple glasses.

We were six years old when it all began.

There is no exact moment that explains how two children become inseparable, but there is the memory of a connection that, for a very long time, was enough.

Layla wasn’t just a friend.

She was a point of reference.

She was home.

And maybe that is why, looking back now, some friction was inevitable too.

I was intense, jealous, and often controlling without even realizing it.

She had a lightness about her that I didn’t know how to have.

We grew up together until life reached the point where it began demanding different choices from us.

When we were fifteen, Layla changed schools.

And at that moment, what was a natural transition for her felt like a rupture to me.

There was no particular argument, no single event that marked the end.

There was a sentence.

She told me she had new friends.

That maybe we wouldn’t be together all the time anymore.

And that was enough.

Friendships don’t necessarily end with fights.

Sometimes they end with the realization that the other person no longer needs you in the same way they once did.

The distance came afterward, gradually.

2020 didn’t help.

No one really knew how relationships were supposed to survive isolation, and many of them didn’t.

Over time, Layla moved forward.

New places, new people, a different routine.

She was doing well.

And for a long time, that was difficult for me to accept.

Because what I felt wasn’t just that I missed her.

It was the feeling of having been replaced.

Meanwhile, on the other side, my reality was different.

An abusive relationship.

A diagnosis of severe depression.

Leaving school for a period of time.

Layla moved forward.

I stayed still for a while.

Years later, we got back in touch occasionally.

There have been attempts to meet, sporadic conversations, a kind of cordiality that doesn’t erase the past but doesn’t recreate it either.

It isn’t the same relationship anymore.

And maybe it never will be again.

What remains is a kind of silent grief.

Grief for something that once existed so intensely, but never found a way to continue.

Mia was part of this story too.

For a while, there were three of us.

Me, Layla, and Mia.

A balance that worked for as long as it lasted.

Mia’s reality was different.

More unstable, more difficult from the beginning.

Her distance wasn’t immediate either, but it followed a similar pattern.

A change of environment, new circumstances, a gradual drifting apart.

The difference is that, in her case, there was a more obvious rupture.

Mia became involved with an older man.

She built a relationship around an idea of love that, in practice, could not sustain itself.

She left everything behind.

Friends, routine, the people and places that once grounded her.

She became pregnant at twenty-one.

By someone who already had other children and a troubled history.

What, at one point, seemed like a promise of stability turned out to be the opposite.

Mia couldn’t find a way out.

And little by little, she became unreachable.

There was one last attempt to stay.

An attempt to be present, to support her, to avoid repeating the abandonment that so often surrounds relationships like these.

But there are limits.

And when those limits are crossed, staying is no longer possible either.

Our last conversation came after a direct conflict.

My refusal to be around her abuser.

Her decision to stay.

And from that point on, silence.

Unlike Layla, whose distance came with time and the natural changes of life, Mia represents a loss that remains unresolved.

There is no resolution.

There is no closure.

There is only the realization that sometimes, no matter how much we want to, we cannot save someone.

These two stories, despite being different, lead to the same conclusion.

Not every relationship is meant to last.

And not every separation can be avoided.

Some people are essential to us at certain points in our lives.

And at other points, having them in our lives is simply no longer possible.

That doesn’t erase what we lived through together.

But it doesn’t guarantee that it will continue either.

In the end, what remains isn’t exactly the friendship as it once existed.

It is the memory of it.

And, in some cases, the realization that certain bonds never completely end.

They simply stop existing in the present.

And begin to occupy another place.

A place we can no longer reach.

But one that continues to exist, somehow, in who we once were.

And in who we still are because of it.