Let us become strangers once again...

The hardest part in letting go is not the fact that you need to let go.  It is the fact that you are not ready to do so without knowing the reason why.  And I guess this is true of any relationship.  A friend of mine I met the other day for coffee was talking to me about how she is unable to understand why suddenly another friend just dropped out of her life without any warning.  They used to meet up every weekend, go out together as a family and share a lot of personal stories. It suddenly came to pass that the friend had her sister visiting her, and the calls tapered off.  She put it down to the visit of her sister, and she went to visit them too. But she came away feeling very cold about the whole visit, for reasons she could not explain.  The sister left, she messaged a couple of times, the response was perfunctory … As far as she was concerned, it ended here.

She also spoke about another friend, who used to practically live in her house, but of late was hardly to be seen. Of course, her new job kept her busy, but then she was not talking about meeting- even the usual phone connect had dimmed. However, she openly confronted this friend about this fact, and told her how much she felt the absence.  Though the friend did agree that she was not around as much as she was before, and she too felt the lacuna, what hurt was that there were no attempts to even minimise the distance between them, even after this talk. I guess this hurt her more.

Realigning an existing relationship is extremely difficult.  In the case of the earlier friend, she could honestly say she did not feel like even wanting to find out what went wrong; in the case of the second friend, she tried and there were no results.  What I could observe in both these cases were that the relationship had shifted gears.  The connect was totally missing, because of which the score for count, the feeling that she mattered enough in the other person’s life, was very low.

She had the option of picking up the phone and confronting them with this fact: to tell them she was nursing a bruised feeling, a hurt.  But she was too tired.  And though she was still coming to terms with the whole new dynamics of the relationships, she believed in : “If you cannot bring the story to a happy ending, then it is better to give it a beautiful turn and then forget the story... Let us become strangers once again…” Lines from an old Bollywood song!