I have this childhood friend. We’ve known each other since we were young kids.

Ever since then, we’ve been complete opposites.

She was loud, confident, and very much a mean girl. If there was a classmate she didn’t like, she wouldn’t hesitate to bully them.

I was different.

And yet, unexpectedly, we clicked.

Throughout grade school, we were almost always together—except during school parties. She preferred mingling with our popular classmates, and I never took it personally.

I was perfectly content being her friend outside those circles.

High school wasn’t much different.

She remained the loud, confident one, while I stayed more reserved. But despite her flaws, she had one quality that I always found endearing: she wasn’t selfish.

Whenever I needed a gown for a school event, she would gladly lend me one.

It was a small thing, but those small things mattered.

In college, even though we attended different schools, we still kept in touch.

After graduation, we found ourselves seeing each other almost every weekend, especially during the time she was nursing a broken heart.

And somehow, that became a pattern.

Through the years, she would often remember me when she was going through something.

For a long time, I wondered why I continued to accept the imbalance in our friendship.

Why didn’t I get tired?

Why didn’t I simply say, This isn’t the kind of friendship I want anymore?

After all, friendship is supposed to be reciprocal. You shouldn’t only remember someone when you need comfort, company, or someone to listen.

But then I realized something about myself.

Maybe I wasn’t holding on simply because I accepted her as she was.

Maybe I was holding on because she had been my friend since I was five.

She felt like home.

Not necessarily because of who she was in the present, but because of who I was whenever I was with her.

Whenever we talked, memories came rushing back.

Grade school classrooms.

School parties.

Gowns borrowed for special occasions.

The people we used to know.

The places we used to go.

The ridiculous things we used to laugh about.

The carefree version of ourselves who had no idea what adulthood would eventually demand from us.

Talking to her somehow brought me back to that little girl I used to be.

And maybe that’s why I found it so difficult to let go, even when I knew the friendship had become uneven.

I wasn’t only holding on to a person.

I was holding on to a time.

Maybe that’s also why, when I feel the distance between us, what I experience isn’t simply the sadness of losing a friend.

It’s nostalgia.

I miss the years she represents.

I miss the childhood that existed when we were both five, ten, fifteen.

I miss the world as I knew it before life became complicated.

And perhaps this is something we don’t realize about old friendships:

Sometimes, we don’t pine for the person as much as we pine for the version of ourselves that existed when that person was beside us.

We think we’re longing for them.

But perhaps we’re longing for the life we had when we were young.

For the girl we used to be.

For the years that can never come back.

She became a living memory of my childhood.

And maybe that’s why, despite everything, a part of me still pines for her.

Not because I am unaware of the imbalance.

Not because I cannot see her flaws.

Not even because the friendship is the same as it used to be.

But because somewhere in my heart, she is still the five-year-old friend who walked beside me through the happiest years of my childhood.

And perhaps that is the real reason why letting go has always been so difficult for me.