Time erodes all things.
It passes like a dream on the other side of memory. Impossible to recall and yet it left its mark. Time moves about you, circles you, smooths you, hardens you. Anything not interwoven into your very being may break free under the constant current of time. Ideas, thoughts, passions, relationships.
Some are slowly sanded away, grain by grain, time smooths away the unnecessary as it cuts its own path. Other times, the break is sudden, violent, damaging. A tree giving way on the edge of rapids, giving itself up, its roots still stuck in the earth.
Friendships may experience a similar fate. Roots forever entangled into your body, into your memory, but the friendship itself has broken free, the current of time pulling it away to an unknown destination.
The loss of friendships may bring about initial pain. To lose part of you is to suffer, and yet sometimes a frostbit limb must be removed to save the body, whereas holding on leads to the spreading of further pain. The loss of something so important may poison your mind for a time. You may wonder if more could have been done. If your body could have survived without the removal. But as the ink of the corruptive thoughts your brain etched out fades, the truth written underneath will always surface. That you are better off, and a new appreciation for the limbs, the friends, remaining, forms.
Because some friends will let you down. Others will abandon you, watch from the safety of land as you sink in surging waters under the weight of the world, not wanting to offer a helping hand in fear of their own selves.
Time exposes this. It erodes what their emotions and feelings hid behind, revealing all to you. It’s why you have fewer friends now than you did while in grade school, and why the fewer, stronger friendships you have now are so much more important. Because they are intertwined with you. The fiber of their souls forever stitched into the fabric of yours. Tearing about one would destroy both. Through the passing of time they remain. They always remain. They are the truth death-till-you-part, as only the conclusion of life will bring about the conclusion of your friendship.
So when friends let you down, when they turn their back on you, only to return when in their own time of need, when they fade like a ghost or turn a blind eye to what’s real, do not fret. Do not worry or drown in frustration. Do not let the pain consume your mind or pull you to murky depths of despair. Instead, let the erosion of time sweep them away, and instead take pleasure in those who remain. Those who are not just there for you, but become part of you.