Vanishing Acts

There are friendships you can disappear from.

Not because anything happened.

Life simply happens.

Work gets demanding. Responsibilities multiply. Your mind gets crowded. Sometimes, you are carrying things you do not have the words to explain.

So you vanish.

Days become weeks. Weeks become months.

Then one day, you send a message.

“Hey.”

And somehow, you are back.

No interrogation. No accounting for your absence. No guilt.

Just that familiar warmth that says, you are still here.

I have come to value these friendships deeply.

Perhaps because some of them were not built in the easy seasons.

We met in places of pain.

We sat through tears. We shared struggles. We carried pieces of each other's stories when life felt too heavy to carry alone.

Sometimes there was no solution.

Just presence.

A listening ear. A prayer. A badly timed joke that somehow made the room lighter.

We became witnesses to each other's lives.

We saw the parts that did not make it into conversation with everyone else.

The fear.

The uncertainty.

The becoming.

And perhaps that is why these friendships can survive our vanishing acts.

There is an understanding that silence is not always distance.

Sometimes, someone is simply trying to find their way through the season they are in.

Some friendships do not measure time by absence.
They measure it by the ease with which you return.

That, to me, is a beautiful kind of friendship.

The kind where you do not have to perform continuity.

You can disappear.

You can grow.

You can get busy.

You can lose track of time.

And when you return, you do not have to rebuild anything.

The bridge was still there.

You sit down.

You laugh.

You tell the stories you have accumulated since you last spoke.

And somewhere between the laughter and the catching up, you realise something:

There are people who have carried your heart before.

And because they have, they know how to hold it when you return.

Perhaps those friendships deserve more than our gratitude.

Perhaps they deserve a message.

A call.

A simple,

“Hey. I know I disappeared. I hope you are well.”

Not because the friendship demands an explanation.

But because some people are too precious to become casualties of our busy lives.

For the friendships we vanish from and return to without fear of rejection,

I am grateful.

Somewhere along the way, we built something strong enough to survive our silence.

Nugget:
Some friendships do not measure time by absence. They measure it by the ease with which you return.