Before the Distance Got Permanent
Back when Pikachu was still cultural currency and the Nokia 3210 represented the pinnacle of human engineering, friendship was a different animal. We spent whole nights annihilating each other at Super Smash Bros. and Phantasy Star Online, stole each other’s girlfriends without much malice, handed them back without ceremony, and met at the village pub for cheap beer like none of it had happened. The trust was total and entirely unreflective. Skipping school, storming house parties, making out with Christina behind the kiosk—none of it worked alone. The world was in working order.
Then you move to the city. The old friends are unemployed or married or studying somewhere far away. They’ve long since deleted Pokémon from their phones and forgotten what a Stone Age handset felt like. Christmas brings a message: so busy, so sorry, so fat, still deep in World of Warcraft, let’s get that beer we’ve been promising each other for four years. Then silence until the next December. The bond that felt like permanent infrastructure has quietly dissolved, and what replaces it is something thinner and more conditional.
What you’re left with is a fleet of good acquaintances, organized by context. University friends, work friends, party friends. You can combine them with your current mood the way you layer clothes. Some of them carry a real warmth. You talk as though you’ve known each other forever, confide things you probably shouldn’t, make plans with genuine intention.
But they don’t transfer. Your closest university friend doesn’t fit into your nights out. Your beloved work colleague goes completely dark the two weeks you’re on holiday. Paula—the woman you dance with every single Saturday, reliably there, every week—seems to exist only after midnight. You have genuinely never encountered her in daylight. You start to wonder whether she casts a shadow.
So maybe the friendships built on actual scraping and scheming and making it right over terrible beer belong to a chapter that doesn’t reopen. We move through adult life mostly alone, and the people we call friends are as interchangeable as whatever’s trending. I’m going to go have a quiet moment about it and then play some Pokémon. In memory of the good old days. Come on, Pikachu.