unfriended

One Thursday morning, I interrupted my mother from her reading. She held her favorite mug up to her lips and silently sipped on the black coffee that she prepared only minutes prior. I pulled a chair out for myself and sat next to her. She immediately noticed that something was bothering me.

Call it mother’s intuition, if you will. But I knew that my feelings were easy to read on my face. I was not happy, but I was not sad either. I did not even get the chance to sigh before she playfully asked if this was about a man she had not known of. I narrowed my eyes and shook my head before telling her that I concluded that two of the last three friends I had since my teen years were no longer my friends.

Perhaps my way of revealing this was overly dramatic. I might have gotten this from my own mother, who always considered herself a romantic. But the women I stopped speaking to were good people who greatly influenced me. I had known them since my middle school years. They were supportive of my endeavors and I of theirs, but time crept up on all of us and we suddenly stopped speaking to each other.

I was partly to blame for our rift; I made very little time for them when I was caught up in my college classes and other on-campus work. And when I finally had the time to give, their schedules were filled to the brim—so they said.

Nevertheless, we texted almost nonstop with updates about our experiences. Little by little, our communication narrowed down to brief hellos, abbreviations, and awkwardly placed laughing emojis. It seems as though feigning interest became more difficult as time went on. There were periods when any one of us stopped responding to the other. And then one summer later, all communication just ended.

“I’m tired of trying to talk to them,” I told my mother who quietly listened. I grabbed a napkin from the holder in front of me and twisted it into a tight lace. It’s like I’m begging them for attention. And if they’re ignoring me, why should I keep trying?”

Of course, there is no way of telling if they were ignoring me. It is likely that they saw the notification on their phones and simply forgot to text me back. But I am not one to lie to myself.

“Do you feel guilty?” she asked suddenly.

“No,” I admitted.

My mother gulped down her remaining coffee and then sighed. She told me that maintaining friendships after high school is never easy. She cited her own experiences as examples and named several people whom she lost contact with.

“People are sometimes too busy with their own problems to notice when people leave anyway,” she said with a shrug before returning to her book.

My friendship with those two started dwindling the moment we reached adulthood and chose different paths. I saw our exchanges as our weak attempts of keeping our interactions going, but once one of us stopped replying with anything, we lost track of each other and became strangers.

Our silence was soon buried in a compiled digital history of our friendship, a history that I would later delete from my own devices. But it is still so vivid in my memory, and I fully appreciate them for the friends they used to be.