There's a person I used to talk to every day for six years. We have not spoken in two. It wasn't a fight. There is no version of this where someone is wrong.

I've been trying to understand what happens to friendship when life reorganizes itself. We were the same age doing the same things in the same city and then we weren't. She moved. I changed jobs. The infrastructure of daily proximity - the commute we shared, the bar we went to, the rhythm of checking in - all of it dissolved in the ordinary course of events. We promised to do better. We both meant it. Neither of us did.

What I think about is the archive. The things only she knows. The version of me that existed in those years, which was partly constructed by being known by her. I became less legible to myself when I became less legible to her. There was a period when I processed the world out loud to her, daily, and that processing shaped what I thought. Now I don't know what I think until much later, when the moment has already passed and the processing isn't useful anymore.

I've looked at her social media. She looks fine. She probably is fine. I am not not fine. But there is a specific vacancy, a kind of hollow in the structure of my days, where the shape of her attention used to be.

I could call her. I know this. The silence has gone on long enough that the call would be an event, and neither of us wants it to be an event, and so neither of us calls.

Do you have people you've let slip this way? Does the friendship still exist if neither person maintains it?