Real life story

Why ‘Forever’ is a Myth

How to view relationships, memories and dealing with loss

I remember a gift my friend gave me seven years ago. It was a phone case with the words, “Should I stay or should I go?” It was a reference to a Netflix series that I liked called, ‘Stranger Things’.

I’ve been writing on this platform about the things I am grateful for, the experiences that have moved me, and the joy in the simplest things in life. Today it is going to be about broken relationships.

I used to believe that the strength of a relationship grows and is proven with time. I used to count the number of years I’ve known a person and take pride in those friendships that have lasted longer than a decade.

I used to always hang out with a friend from school, let’s call her Helena Radcliff (not her real name). We grew up together. It was a difficult decision, but I decided to move to a different town. We don’t speak to each other often now. She reads all my posts, and we wish each other for our birthdays, and if we are lucky there might even be one or two catch-up sessions sprinkled throughout the year.

When I go back home, I see my room filled with photos of the pair of us but I don’t recognise either of those people. When I go back home, I drive past the parking lot we hung out at 1 am reading the messages a boy sent her, I walk past the place where we tried cake samples pretending it was for our parents’ wedding, I sit in the place where both of us got our exam results, I eat the brownie we used to gobble down every time we took the train to the city. It often feels like I’m trespassing a graveyard of memories. Everything is the same and different at the same time.

Growing up, one of the difficult aspects I’ve been forced to come to terms with is how best friends become strangers and how strangers become best friends. But maybe we’ve been looking at relationships wrong. It can be any relationship, a friend you don’t speak to anymore, a partner you broke up with, a grandparent you have lost…

We always expect the characters in our book to last throughout the book. But maybe a few chapters in the middle are reserved for the characters who might not make it to the end. These chapters can be bookmarked to read and revisit any time you desire. Maybe these characters will re-enter the book in a few chapters’ time. Maybe these characters are tethered only to those initial chapters during which you believed with all your heart that they would make it to the end with you.

Or maybe there is no beginning and end.

It was beautifully explored in a monologue by Nellie from ‘Haunting of the Hill House’, “I thought for so long that time was like a line, that our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they fell one into another… but it’s not like that at all. Our moments fall all around us like rain. Or snow. Or confetti.”

Sometimes, when we love a character, we bargain for more of these confetti with them. But when we truly love someone, no matter how much confetti you get with them, it still won’t seem enough. Maybe grief, nostalgia, accepting loss, or missing someone is just learning to love them differently, in a way that you might not be used to loving them.

I miss my friend when I hear her favourite song, when my mum makes the food that she used to love, when I read something that I know we would have debated about for hours. It seemed funny to me, how I have so much knowledge about a person, but no place or opportunity to use it. Maybe in this chapter of my life, I have to love her in a different way, between the flashback of memories, and between the pages of my story where she lives.

There’s a Korean concept called ‘Jeong’. It highlights the deep feelings of attachment that you feel towards a person. In my mind, it indicates the bonds that you form with people throughout your life. Sometimes, it might be time that a character exits a story because of a fight, or because of fate. But this bond, the Jeong, remains forever. That’s what I have with Helena.

There’s a series on Netflix that I recently watched called, ‘One Day’. Each episode is one day of the year, every year over a decade in the life of two people. Since watching the show, I pause to think if I would be surprised if I just saw a snapshot of myself in the moment a couple of years ago. In the past, Helena and I have had a similar conversation. I told her I wished I could see clues or patterns in my life with which I could predict my future. She said, “Maybe once you’re in the future, you could look for the clues in the past.”

Maybe the phone case that she gifted me was foreshadowing the choice that awaited me.

“Should I stay, or should I go?”

But maybe the question wasn’t about staying or going but had always been about the aftermath of each of those actions.

I remember the days when I promised ‘forever’ to the friend who inspired this post. I don’t think anyone could keep that promise. To all the people I love, I can’t promise you a ‘forever’, but I will promise you this moment. This confetti.