No. 4 THE CURRENT

There was no argument. No betrayal. No moment you can point to and say that is where it broke.

One of you moved. Or got busy. Or both. The texts got slower. The gaps got longer. And one day you realised it had been five months since you spoke and neither of you had noticed until just now.

This is how most people leave your life. Not through the front door, slamming it on the way out. Through the back, so quietly you don't hear it until the house feels different and you can't work out why.

You still like each other's posts. You still say we should catch up and mean it every time, and do nothing about it every time. There is no bad blood. There is just life, which turns out to be a current strong enough to carry two people in different directions without either of them choosing to swim away.

When you are young, connection is effortless. You see people without planning it. You talk for hours about nothing, and it matters more than anything. You can't imagine a time when you won't know what they had for dinner last night.

Then the current picks up. Work. Distance. Partners. Children. Exhaustion. The energy it takes to maintain a friendship stops being something you naturally have and becomes something you have to find. And some weeks you can barely find enough energy to maintain yourself.

Nobody teaches you how to grieve a person who is still alive. There is no word for it. You can't say you're heartbroken about someone who didn't do anything wrong. They are still there, technically. You just don't talk anymore. And the space where they used to be doesn't hurt, exactly. It hums. Especially when something happens that they would have understood without you having to explain it.

It is not too late. It is never the perfect message. It is the imperfect one. The I don't need anything, I was just thinking about you.

Send it. Send it today. Send it badly.

It is one message wide. It always was.