I kept hoping the friendship would become what it had been again

Dear Delyara, That hope cost me more than I understood while I was inside it. I think I spent too long relating not to the actual friendship in front of me, but to its earlier version — the one that had warmth, attention, rhythm, ease. I kept assuming that if I stayed patient enough, graceful enough, emotionally intelligent enough, the old version would return. It didn’t. And because I was hoping for memory instead of reading reality, I stayed long enough for loneliness to become normal. That’s what still hurts. Not only that the friendship changed. That I kept translating the change into something temporary because I did not want to grieve it properly. There is a very particular sadness in realizing that history has been doing emotional labor the present can no longer support. I felt that this week.