No Overlap

Pikachu was cool when I was fifteen and so were my friends, and we truly believed it would last. We had something real under all the idiocy—Super Smash Bros marathons that went until dawn, group chats that felt important, the absolute certainty that someone would pick up the phone at three in the morning. You don’t question it at that age. You just know it’s permanent.

Then everyone scattered. Different cities, different jobs, different lives. The friendships didn’t survive it. You get Christmas messages about catching up sometime, but there’s never a sometime. These were supposed to be your people and somehow they just aren’t anymore.

What you get instead are situational friends. University friends who don’t fit when you’re older. Colleagues who vanish the moment you quit. People from bars and parties who feel real while you’re with them and completely gone the next day. I had someone I’d see most nights, dancing until closing, and I realized one morning I’d never seen her in daylight. That’s your friendship right there—perfect inside the club, nonexistent outside it.

What gets me isn’t how shallow they are. It’s how good it can feel. You laugh like you’ve known each other forever. You talk about real things. You live like there’s no tomorrow. Then something shifts and it all just stops. There’s nothing underneath to hold it up, nothing that survives the context collapsing.

I’ve accepted it. The real friendships—the ones where someone knows you—are locked away with people you haven’t thought about in years. Everything else is pleasant and uses you up and then it’s done. You end up knowing all these people who know pieces of you, but none of them know the whole thing. Somehow that’s just how it is now.

I’m going to play Pokémon in a minute. Not as nostalgia, not ironically, just because the thought of it made something click.