Not all of them did.
That is the honest accounting. Some friendships are built for a particular season and when the season ends the friendship ends with it, not badly, not with a rupture, just with a gradual quieting, the calls getting farther apart, the silences getting more comfortable in the wrong direction, until the friendship becomes a person you used to know and still think of warmly and would be glad to see and do not see, and the not-seeing is a small grief that you carry without ceremony because there is no ceremony for the friendships that simply fade.
But some survived.
The ones that survived are different from the ones that faded, and the difference is not about how long they lasted or how much history they contain but about a quality I am trying to name precisely. A kind of room-making. The friends who survived are the ones who made room for all the versions of me, who received the burned-out version and the rebuilding version and the version who was figuring out what rest meant and the version who went to Mexico by herself and came back changed, and who did not require me to be the same version they had known before in order to stay.
I have three of those.
Three people who have been present through the whole arc, not every moment of it, not without their own absences and my own absences and the long stretches that the busy years carved out of the consistent contact, but present in the way that matters, in the you-are-still-my-person-whatever-the-distance way, in the way that means when I call unexpectedly on a Tuesday the voice at the other end is genuinely glad.
I do not take them for granted.
That is something I know now that I did not know in the years when I was too busy to tend the friendships properly, when I assumed they would maintain themselves because they always had, when I let them run on the goodwill accumulated from the years before without depositing anything new. I know now that the friendships that survive are the ones you show up for. They do not survive on their own. They survive because someone, sometimes you, sometimes them, keeps showing up.
I am showing up. More than before. As much as I can. It is not enough and it is more than it was and I am grateful for every Tuesday voice that is genuinely glad.
