We all have those people who we know like the back of our hands. Whether that person is our best friend, one of our family members, or our significant other; we all have someone we know better than we know ourselves and they can say the same thing for us. But sometimes life happens and we drift apart from the people we love and as much as we try to save the relationship; sometimes we do not succeed, and then all of a sudden someone that we know becomes someone we knew.

The beginning of the end; something that once you start to feel coming you try so desperately to ignore. However, the more that feeling is ignored, the more intense it becomes. Eventually the feeling will be something that can no longer be ignored and soon the conversations between you and the person you used to not be able to imagine going one day without talking to become forced, the silences that used to make you feel at home become uncomfortable, and being around that person is no longer an activity that fills you with laughter but with heartache instead. Beginning to drift away from someone that you love so much is painful but something that is sometimes in the cards that life gives to us. Sometimes growing up means growing apart and we have to learn to be okay with that.

When you’ve drifted away from someone you love the thing is, there are still little pieces of them left in your life, you continue to remember all the things they loved, all your inside jokes, the clothes you borrowed or took without asking and it’s too late now to give them back, and pictures and letters that they gave to you. Remembering these little things makes us remember the person we knew in the past, but people change. I know that I change a little bit every day so I don’t know how I can honestly ever expect people I drifted from to be the same people that they once were when we were close. When you run into someone you’ve drifted apart from and you want to walk over to them and say “hey” and catch up but it isn’t until you can’t think of what you would even say until you realize that you do not know them anymore. You don’t know what to say to them because you don’t know what’s been going on in their life because you haven’t spoken in such a long time. There’s only so much that you can know from social media, and people often times don’t publicize the things that they’ve been struggling with so it’s hard to know what all you have missed. So as you ponder whether or not to just avoid them to get out of an awkward situation, your moment passes. But by then you’ve realized that once upon a time you did know them but now, they are just someone you knew.