Lost Friendships

There’s this quote I saw on Instagram the other day that I just can’t get out of my head: “Friends are like trains: some travel with you for a long time, some leave at certain stations, but the memories of the journey always remain.”

The moment I read it, something inside me cracked. Because that’s exactly what my life has felt like over the past few years. A series of stations where I’ve had to say goodbye to people I thought would be with me forever. And every time it happens, it leaves me with this strange emptiness I don’t know how to explain.

I still think about them. More often than I admit. At night when I’m overthinking, when I scroll through old pictures, when I come across something small that reminds me of them. I replay conversations in my head, I remember their laughs, I remember the times we were inseparable. And then I catch myself asking, what went wrong? Could I have done something differently? If I had been more patient, more forgiving, less stubborn, maybe they would have stayed? But no matter how many times I twist it around in my mind, I never find a real answer. Because sometimes, people just leave. And you can’t make them stay.

One of the hardest losses for me was a close college friend, I’ll call her Rihana. (All names I use here are fake, because I can’t disclose real ones.) That friendship drained me more than I realized at the time. It felt like being in a toxic cycle where I kept giving and she kept taking. She never really put in the effort, and whenever I tried harder, it still wasn’t enough. The part that broke me the most was when she went and became close with people she once told me she hated, just to make me jealous. I can still remember how that felt. Like a punch in the chest. That was the moment I realized how one-sided everything had been, and how little I actually mattered to her.

Then there were Shaila, Fen, and Delilia. With them, it was different, but the pain was the same. That friendship ended in gossip and backbiting. From my side, it looked like jealousy. I got more attention from the guys in our group, and they didn’t like it. I never asked for that attention, I never cared about it, but somehow it became this invisible competition that poisoned everything. I still don’t understand how people who once laughed with me, ate with me, spent hours talking with me, could so easily turn around and talk behind my back. It hurt in a way I didn’t expect, because it made me question whether anything they said to me was ever real.

And then there was Vani. That friendship was exhausting in its own way. She always wanted to prove she was better than me. Every conversation somehow turned into an argument, every moment felt like a chance for her to put me down. It wasn’t obvious at first, but over time it chipped away at me. I felt smaller and smaller around her, like I had to fight to be seen. I stayed longer than I should have, convincing myself maybe it was just her personality, maybe it was just her way of expressing herself. But eventually I realized I couldn’t keep loving someone who only wanted to bring me lower.

Now, I’m not saying I was perfect in any of these friendships. I know I made mistakes too. Maybe I wasn’t always patient, maybe I wasn’t always understanding. From my perspective, this is how it all looked. From theirs, I might have been the problem. Maybe I was the selfish one. Maybe I said things that hurt without realizing. I’ll never know the whole truth, and that’s the part that eats at me sometimes. But the reality is the same either way. I lost them.

And losing friends… it’s brutal. It’s a pain people don’t talk about enough. One day you’re telling them everything, they’re the first person you text when something good or bad happens, they know your secrets, your fears, your dumbest jokes. And then one day, they’re just gone. They’re a name on your phone you don’t know if you should text anymore. They’re someone you once shared your whole world with, and now they’re just a memory. And that feels like a death in its own way, except no one treats it like that. No one really understands unless they’ve been through it too.

But here’s the thing I’ve slowly come to realize. It’s not all bad. As much as it hurts, as much as it makes me cry sometimes, every friendship gave me something. Whether it stayed or ended, it left me with a piece of love, a memory, a lesson. I can’t throw all of it away just because the ending was ugly. Those late-night talks still happened, those moments of laughter were real, those pieces of comfort and belonging still belong to me.

College really made this hit harder. With school friends, there was a sense of growing together, adjusting for each other, bending when needed. But college friendships are different. They come with bigger egos, stronger opinions, less patience. Everyone’s trying to prove something, everyone’s trying to stand out. And maybe that’s why so many don’t last.

But maybe that’s also just how life works. Not everyone is meant to stay. Some people are only meant to walk with us for a little while, to be part of certain chapters and not the whole story. They leave at their station, and we have to keep moving. It doesn’t mean the journey we had with them was meaningless. The fights, the jokes, the random conversations, the bond—it all mattered, even if it ended.And maybe that’s why this quote will stay with me forever. Because it captures everything I feel about lost friendships in one line: “Friends are like trains: some travel with you for a long time, some leave at certain stations, but the memories of the journey always remain.”