I spent most of my idle thoughts today thinking about someone I haven’t spoken to in almost nine months. I have a lot of people from my past that I haven’t spoken to in various lengths of time, most of them greater than nine months, but this one occupies me in ways that the rest don’t. Most of the rest of these long silences are the result of walls I built or deliberate choices to make a change in my life that took me away from people. Some are the notable ends of long-running and incredibly unhealthy codependent relationships that I was unable to change for the better as I changed for the better–it takes change on both people’s parts to better a relationship like that and I’ve only ever been able to control my own behavior. Some were relationships I ended because they were unhealthy for me, because the other person only ever took from me, because it was clear I could not rely on them when it really mattered, or because I simply grew tired of needing to overlook the ways they frequently hurt me without ever learning to treat me better. Some just faded into silence as time and distance took their toll. Only one was because someone else set a boundry and I have kept my silence for these past nine months out of respect for their request.

The others weigh on me from time to time, of course, much like any mistake from my past weighs on me. I feel just as bad about one memory I have from a time in college (when I was trying to warn someone that other people were upset with them but I was too drunk to convey that and just upset the person I was trying to help) as I do about the people I don’t talk to anymore because of their inability to change a behavior I told them bothered me despite repeated promises that they’d do better. It stings when it comes up but it tends to only ever come up when I’m already upset with myself about something or because I get brought back to the moment by a similar situation or sense memory. I can even write about them as I am right now without getting pulled into the emotional morass they once stirred within me. Not so this other long silence. Whenever something happens that brings it to mind, it stays there for a day or two, clouding my mind with all the questions I can’t ask and the uncertainty I feel that it will ever end despite this friend once saying that it wouldn’t be permanent.

Some amount of this emotional weight can be chalked up to how relatively recent this is, though only if you weight the passage of time by major life events like I do. A handful of these ended relationships and enduring silences happened just about a year ago, in the incredibly pointless wizard game debacle of early 2023, which makes them only three months prior to the weightier one. Separating them, though, is my trip to Spain which was such a significant change in my life that I can’t help but mark time before and after that event as being distinctly different. Things that happened before feel so much older than things that happened even shortly after my life settled back down following my return. Sure, I’ve had two more major events that happened within two weeks of each other (being a part of a wedding and then moving) only a couple months later, but they didn’t have as large an impact on my life as the trip to Spain did (partly, unfortunately, because this long silence is a result of something that happened on that trip, even if it took a few weeks for me to fully grasp the repercussions).

A significant chunk of the emotional weight carried by this long since is that all those other silences are a result of relationships ending. There will be no return for those relationships and even the ones I occasionally think about renewing should not be renewed. I did not, after all, end any of them lightly and, so far, only once in my life has someone I’ve removed from my life done the work to address there reasons I created distance between us. All these other people have been unfriended or even blocked on various social media sites. Their phone numbers haven’t been deleted, but they’ve been tagged with warnings and their contacts set to stop updating to the cloud so, if I ever get a new phone number, they will all be left behind with this one. They have all ended as conclusively and finally as anything can end when you still have some friends in common, share a city, or sometimes wind up in the same digital circles. This other lingering silence has not ended our friendship, so far as I can tell. It would have to be their choice to close off these social connections since they are the one who wanted time and space apart, which is not a step they’ve taken yet. I still hope for a reconcilliation some day, but I’ll admit that nine months of silence is more than I expected to ever pass between us.

After all, the majority of the emotional weight this silence has is a result of how close I was with this person before all this happened. I’m not sure if we’ll ever speak again, their assurances from the last messages following their sudden silence aside, since I didn’t expect it to last even through last summer. I’m so far out of my depth and my expectations for this relationship that I find myself wondering if it was as solid as I thought. I find myself wondering if there was more this friend didn’t say to me because they didn’t know how. I find myself wondering if there was a greater distance between us than I thought, even before this silence. It is difficult to reconcile the closeness I felt with how things have gone in the ten months since they starting creating distance between us. All I can do is accept that things stand the way they stand and, if this really did end our long friendship, that my perception of events must have been very different from theirs. It’s a rough spot to be in and it has given me a great deal of empathy toward the people I’ve cut off from my life, though I’d say there’s still enough difference between the two situations that this empathy isn’t entirely deserved by the people I’ve cut off, regardless of how willing I am to direct it at them. I would say that, though, since I’m not the one drawing the boundary, so I’m not entirely sure how much I can assert that. After all, it doesn’t really matter how I feel about what happened between us since it was, regardless of all else, my choices that created the situation that upset my friend.

I wish I had some answers. I wish I could contact my friend and ask them what’s going on. I can’t shake the feeling, though, that I was incredibly clear about what I was going to do and why I was going to do it when I told them I’d give them the time and space they said they wanted, so it would be awfully hypocritical of me to disrespect someone else’s boundaries after doing so much work to establish and enforce my own over the past few years. I have very few hard and fast personal rules since I recognize that the vagaries of life make it difficult to stick to any kind of absolute, but one I’ve maintained for years and that is a fundamental aspect of my sense of self is that I will keep my word when I give it, so long as no harm will be done to others by my doing so. I will not go back on what I told this friend no matter how much I want to because, ultimately, I can only control my own actions in situations like this. Which really sucks sometimes, but all I can do is make the best choice from the options before me and, since giving up and breaking my word are lines I’m not yet willing to cross, waiting in silence is all that’s left, however long that takes.