Bye, Baby

by Carola Lovering

Or maybe that’s just how friendship works when you’re young. Maybe the choice to tether yourselves to each other isn’t a choice at all but an unconscious pull that doesn’t require an explanation, a response to shared circumstance, joined with something in your heart that feels good and right. The loyalty that follows feels inherent, lasting, tamperproof.

That’s just how friendships become in your thirties, I think as I head south. The love is still there, but the urgency for that constant companionship fades, replaced by something else—romantic partnerships, yes, but maybe we also just get tired.

The weight of real adulthood looms, not yet ours to carry. There’s a precious transience to this time, the bittersweet sense that it won’t always be this way. That it can’t.