Losing Friends To Time
If you live enough you find you can lose friends in the most surprising ways. They might just move away and you lose touch with them. Or they might simply grow apart from you in interests.They may even die of an accident suddenly or of an acute illness. Those are hard because they leave you with this surprising blank spot in your soul. You don't know what to make of the permanent absence of your friend, wrought by accident or illness. Yet one of the worst may be to lose your friend to clinical mental illness. Those are hard.
They might be there but they might be without continuity of thought. It's disconcerting, because they're physically present, but the mind you knew to be there is impaired. When you're young, you don't expect this stuff to happen to your friends. The sheen of youthful invulnerability can get pulverised by mental illness. Then mental illness drops on them and subsequently you spend years trying to gauge just how much is left of them, and which bits are the illness. And just as if they had died you go through the grieving stages, and come out the other end still wondering what's left.
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