I was sorting through old boxes in the attic when I found them - the toys I once loved so completely that I couldn’t imagine a day without them. Small figures, faded puzzles, fragments of imagined worlds. Each one carefully placed away years ago, though I can’t remember when, or why.
What struck me wasn’t the objects themselves, but the tenderness in their arrangement. Someone - most likely my parents - had packed them gently, as if to preserve not just the things, but the time they belonged to. I must have told myself - and them - I’d come back for the toys. And then I didn’t. Standing there, I realized how easily life fills with these quiet abandonments - not from carelessness, but from change. At some point, without meaning to, we outgrow the toys that once held our whole attention. We don’t throw them away; we just stop reaching for them.
And I thought: isn’t that how some friendships fade, too? Not with anger, not with distance, but with time. We don’t decide to let them go; we simply keep walking, and one day realize we’ve moved past the point where we last saw each other. There are people who once felt essential - the ones who knew our secrets, our laughter, our early selves. For a while, their presence was part of our architecture. And then life rearranged itself: new jobs, new cities, new stories. We meant to call, to meet. We didn’t. And now, they live somewhere in the attic of memory, wrapped in dust and gentleness.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if we opened those boxes - if we tried to return to those friendships exactly as they were. I think we’d find that the shape has changed. The affection remains, but the language has faded. We’ve both become different people, building new rooms in the same house of time. But perhaps that’s not loss - perhaps it’s just the way life stores what once mattered. Those friendships aren’t gone; they’re preserved. They belong to who we were, and they wait for us there, quietly intact, asking for nothing but remembrance.
Maybe the kindness is in letting them stay in the past, knowing they built part of who we are now. We don’t need to dust off every box to feel its weight.