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Transcript
- There is a specific kind of grief that hits you in October, when the air turns crisp and you realize you’ll never hear your best friend’s laugh again because she moved back to London three months ago. It feels like losing someone who was already gone, even though they only existed in your life for six weeks. Let’s sit with that for a second. We are taught, from the moment we can tie our shoes, that friendship is supposed to be permanent. It’s supposed to be the person who walks you down the aisle, or holds your hand at the hospital, or sits on the porch with you when you’re too old to climb stairs. We build our identities around these long-term anchors. But then, something happens. Maybe it’s a summer in Portugal, or a semester in Kyoto, or a few intense weeks working on a project in Berlin. You meet someone, and the friction of your daily lives disappears. The context of your normal world—your bills, your family dynamics, your job titles—it all falls away. In its place is this raw, unfiltered connection. You share meals on floors. You walk until your feet blister. You talk about everything and nothing until the sun comes up. And for those few weeks, you feel more seen than you have in years. But here’s the thing that keeps me up at night sometimes: what happens when the season ends? What happens when the plane lands, and the suitcase is packed, and you’re back in your own apartment, staring at a wall that doesn’t know your name? I remember a summer I spent in a small coastal town in Greece. I was twenty-six, lost, and trying to figure out who I was supposed to be. I met Elena there. We didn’t speak the same language fluently, but we spoke the same language of loneliness. We spent days wandering through olive groves, eating figs that stained our fingers purple, and talking about fears we’d never admitted to anyone back home. She told me she was terrified of her future; I told her I was terrified of my past. We became each other’s confessional. It was intense. It was electric. It felt like we had known each other for decades. But I want to ask you, gently: why do we treat these moments as failures if they end? We mourn them like deaths, when they were really just… seasons. Like a flower blooming. You don’t cry when the tulip dies in spring because it didn’t make it to winter. You thank it for the color it brought to your yard while it lasted. These friendships abroad, these brief, intense connections—they aren’t meant to last forever. They are meant to show us who we are capable of being when the noise is turned down. They are mirrors. Elena showed me that I could be brave. That I could trust strangers. That I could let someone else carry some of the weight, just for a little while. Tell me more about the cost of that letting go. Because it does hurt. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. There is a hollow ache in returning home. You look at your current friends, the ones who’ve been there for ten years, and they seem… different. Slower. Heavier. You miss the lightness of the person who knew you only in your best hours. You miss the fact that no one expected anything from you except presence. So you might try to force that intensity into your regular life. You text your new friend at 3 AM, expecting them to answer, expecting them to understand the depth of your feelings without the context of the shared experience. And when they don’t, when they say, 'Hey, it’s late,' you feel rejected. You feel like you’ve been abandoned. But this is the trap. You are comparing a highlight reel to their behind-the-scenes. You are asking a temporary companion to play a permanent role. And they cannot do that. Not because they don’t care, but because they have their own lives, their own gravity, pulling them back. To love them deeply is to accept that their departure is not a rejection of you. It is simply the nature of the arrangement. The ticket was valid for June. July is a bonus. What does loyalty look like on a Tuesday, when you’re sitting in your cubicle or washing dishes, and you remember the way the light hit the water in that harbor in Barcelona? It looks like gratitude. It looks like saying, 'Thank you for being there.' It looks like understanding that some people come into our lives to teach us how to breathe differently. I used to think that if a friendship ended, it meant I had failed. Or they had failed. Or it wasn’t 'real' enough to survive distance. But I’ve learned that realness isn’t measured in years. It’s measured in impact. Did they change you? Did they make you softer? More curious? More willing to take a risk? If yes, then it was real. The fact that it ended doesn’t erase the truth of what happened. It just means the chapter closed. And that’s okay. Some books are meant to be short. They pack a punch. They leave you breathless. You don’t need to reread them every day to honor them. You just need to remember how it felt to turn the page. So how do we hold this loss without drowning in it? First, by naming it. Don’t call it 'just a phase.' Call it a significant relationship. Acknowledge the grief. It’s okay to miss them. It’s okay to feel sad that the magic has faded. But then, we have to separate the person from the context. You miss the version of yourself you were when you were with them. You miss the freedom. The anonymity. The lack of responsibility. Those things are hard to find back home. So instead of looking for them in your old friends, look for them in new spaces. Find a hobby where you are a beginner again. Join a group where no one knows your history. Create small, temporary communities that allow for that same intensity, without the expectation of permanence. A book club. A hiking group. A volunteer shift. These are safe places to practice intimacy without the fear of lifelong entrapment. You get to taste the nectar without drinking the whole jar. And that is enough. It is so much more than enough. It is nourishment. There is a profound beauty in transience. Think about cherry blossoms. Everyone flocks to see them because they know they won’t last. If they stayed open for six months, we wouldn’t stop to admire them. We’d walk past them. We’d take them for granted. But because they fall, we pause. We photograph them. We write poems about them. Your summer friends are your cherry blossoms. They remind you that beauty is fleeting. That connection is precious precisely because it is rare. Don’t rush to replace them. Don’t rush to fill the void with another quick fix. Sit in the emptiness for a bit. Let it teach you what you value most in connection. Do you value depth? Safety? Excitement? Honesty? Once you know what you value, you can cultivate it in your long-term relationships too. You can bring a little bit of that summer intensity into your Tuesday nights. You can be more present. More honest. More willing to be vulnerable with the people who stay. They are waiting for you. They just need you to show up, fully, without the filter of travel or novelty. You are loved, exactly as you are, in this moment, wherever you are. Take a deep breath. You’ve got this. I’ll be here next week, ready to listen. Until then, be gentle with your heart. It’s doing its best.