The Painful Truth About Outgrowing The People You Never Thought You Would

One day you’re sitting around the living room laughing, feeling in your heart that nothing can ever go wrong because you’re happy. You’re really, truly happy and that’s something you’ve been waiting a while to say. For once in your life everything feels whole and complete.

Then the next thing you know years have gone by. You see them Tweet and you realize you don’t know who they are anymore. You don’t know what their schedule is like, you don’t know what’s happening in their life, you don’t hear their stories. You don’t laugh like you used to, you don’t know where you belong but you know it’s not in their life anymore.

You realize just how lost you are without them.

You don’t know how time escaped you like this and how your best friend can turn into a total stranger. You don’t know how you lost touch, when your connection faded or what changed between you, but you remember when you said both said forever.

You know your road together hit a dead-end and you had to move forward on your own, you had to go your separate ways and inside it’s killing you, it’s still killing you. You miss them terribly, but you know another “I miss you” text won’t do anything, you know it won’t change anything and it can’t bring the way things used to be back.

It hurts, it’s lonely and it’s suffocating. You feel like you’ve been hit hard in the chest and had the wind completely knocked out of you. It’s like part of you is missing now that they’re gone.

You look back at all the old pictures and you can’t help but wonder why things had to end this way, you can’t help but wonder why life took you both in different directions.

But you don’t try either, maybe it’s because you’re over the failed attempts, maybe it’s because that part of your life is over, maybe it’s because as much as you think you miss them you more so just miss that part of your life when everything felt good and you were truly happy. Maybe that’s what you miss more than the person.

Missing them is painful – it’s a heartache and a giant lump in your throat you just can’t swallow. It’s wanting to go back more than anything. It’s not being ready to accept that things will never be that way again.

The truth about outgrowing people is that we all do it. Time and life move forward it doesn’t wait for anyone. Eventually people change, interests change, feelings change. Jobs consume our lives, family becomes our world and one day we look up at the mirror and realize we don’t even know who we are anymore or how we got here.

It doesn’t stop the hurt, the wishing you could go back in time, or the anger you feel knowing you made the most of the time you had together but it still wasn’t enough.

You need those people in your life, the ones who make forever seem too short. But the truth is, we didn’t get forever. We only get a few years before life leads us down different paths and we wake up alone wondering how we got there.

I miss the time we spent together and I miss you. I wish we could stop the hands of time and just go back. Go back to better days, days where we could just sit around the living room and laugh over nothing because we were happy. We were really, truly happy.