anyway, don't be a stranger

on falling out and letting people leave your life as easily as they walked into it

Now we’re in the yard, gonna plant a tree

Shower it with love until it dies eventually

– “Meclizine”, Harrison Whitford

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

I’ve been thinking a lot about loving and leaving, and the extent to which the old, overused adage is true: if you love something, let it go. I’ve been realizing, slowly over time, that all relationships, regardless of the category they fall into, serve their purpose until they don’t. It’s one of life’s saddest, most bittersweet truths.

I’ve always had a tendency to hold onto people longer than I should, purely because of how many years there are between us. But it often slips my mind; the fact that people change people, and even more so, time changes people—so really, neither of us are the same people we were when we first met, are we? The versions of us that we were before might’ve needed each other, but the versions we now inhabit may not. I think we’re all just collections of previous selves, each version containing traces of who we used to be, but fundamentally changed by every encounter, every tragedy, and every moment of joy. The people we choose to love leave their marks on us and change us, until we wake up one day and realize we don’t recognize the voices we’re speaking with, at least not fully.

No matter the role a person plays in my life, the way I know I truly care about and love someone is when I choose to love them over and over again, throughout all the different versions of themselves they become, without a second thought. I think that’s how most people make the distinction between people they love and people they don’t. But I find myself getting angry and deeming it unfair sometimes, because while I’ll choose to keep loving and putting effort into a relationship, the sentiment is not always returned. The trouble doesn’t lie in finding people to love, the difficulty is more evident in finding people to love who will return it back to you without even having to ask. It shouldn't have to be a question. It should occur like clockwork; an autonomic response.

I tend to grieve people and experiences long before they even leave me, but other times I am filled with so much love that the concept of the moment disappearing won’t even cross my mind. I’ll subconsciously block it out and convince myself: this moment will last forever. It has to. The joy is so vast and all-consuming that the chest-aches and tingly fingers don’t arrive until later, along with any hindsight realizations.

Sometimes it hits me all at once; the sudden realization that things haven’t been the same for a while now. Noticing that we’ve both just been going through the motions, and any inside jokes I tell to try and circle us back to our regularly scheduled programming no longer hit the same, and instead, now feel worn thin. I’ll start noticing more silences than conversations, and how texts can sit unread for days, how plans can become maybes and then become nothing at all. At some point, I’ll realize that we’ve stopped sharing the little things—the mundane moments that once seemed so urgent to talk about. The sushi place they just discovered, the song that made me cry in my car, the dream that felt too real to keep to myself, the joke their dad told at dinner last night. These tiny withholdings begin to accumulate until one day we both look around and realize the friendship has become a museum of what it used to be—preserved, but no longer living.

Old friend, hope I’ll see you again

I’ll do what I can to get back to you

We’ve both changed but our love stays the same

I’ll do what I can to stay close to you

– “Doing Our Worst”, Molly Payton

It’s so strange how memory works, at least for me—some moments feel eternal, almost infinite as they’re happening, yet slip right through my fingers the moment I realize their temporality and try to hold onto them. Other times, the weight of a dreaded goodbye casts a shadow dark enough to dim the moments where I should feel the most joy. When this happens, it’s almost as if I begin to simultaneously exist in the present joy and the future pain, stretching myself thin across the space between now and not-yet.

The hardest part isn’t the leaving, or even the staying: it’s the recognition that sometimes there is no dramatic ending, no final argument, no clear point of departure—which can be difficult for someone like me who is willing to suffer for the guaranteed reward of a good story to tell. But sometimes, it just finished what it was always meant to do, taught what it was always meant to teach, and now it’s time to let it rest in the archive of what once was but no longer needs to be. And like the second half of that old, overused adage says: if it’s truly yours, it’ll come back. I really, really hope it does.

The art of loving isn’t necessarily about perfecting our grip, but learning to hold things gently—creating a space between both love and loss can coexist, where we can love what we have, with all that we have, while also acknowledging its transience. I think that’s what makes loving someone worth it, anyway.

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