There are people I’ve been meaning to call for months. Years, in some cases. Not because I don’t care about them, but because I care in a way that requires more energy than I currently have.
I keep them in a mental waiting room. Someday, when I’m less tired, less busy, more myself, I’ll reach out properly. I’ll have that long conversation. I’ll reconnect with the depth the relationship deserves.
Someday never comes, of course. It just keeps receding, like the horizon.
The Japanese have a concept called kizuna, the bonds between people. But there’s another term that interests me more: en, which refers to the thread of connection that links people across time and circumstance. It’s thinner than kizuna, more delicate. It can survive periods of neglect, but not indefinitely.
I learned this from a friend I lost without noticing. We’d been close once, the kind of friends who didn’t need explanations. Then life happened. Distance, careers, different cities. We kept meaning to call. We kept not calling.
When I finally did reach out, years later, the thread had gone slack. We were polite, friendly even. But the connection that had once felt effortless now required work we were both too tired to do. We’d become strangers who used to know each other.
The Stoics believed we should treat each interaction as if it might be the last. Memento mori, they called it. Remember death. Not to be morbid, but to be present. To not squander the irreplaceable.
But that level of intensity is exhausting. We can’t treat every conversation like it’s our last. We’d never survive the emotional labour.
So we make compromises. We tell ourselves that some relationships can wait. That they’ll still be there when we have more capacity. That true friendship survives neglect.
Sometimes that’s even true. Some bonds are resilient enough to withstand years of silence. You pick up right where you left off, as if no time has passed.
But other relationships are like plants that need regular watering. Miss too many days and you return to find something that can’t be revived.
I think about the people in my waiting room. The ones I keep meaning to call. Some of them, I know, are already gone. The version of our friendship I’m holding onto exists only in my memory. The actual relationship has quietly died from neglect.
There’s no moral to this. No tidy wisdom about making time for what matters. Sometimes you don’t have the energy. Sometimes you’re just surviving.
But perhaps there’s value in admitting it. In recognising that the waiting room is sometimes just a comfortable fiction we tell ourselves. That meaning to call and actually calling are separated by a distance that never closes.
Some threads snap. Not from a dramatic severing, but from simple lack of tension. We stop pulling, and one day we notice the connection was already gone.