A.S. Thorne

Here’s what I know now, with a little distance and a lot less noise:

Some people are meant to walk with you for a long time.
Others are meant to change you forever—and then step out of the frame.

Both matter.

We don’t talk enough about the friendships that don’t explode, don’t betray loudly, don’t end with slammed doors or dramatic exits. The ones that simply… shift. Quietly. Permanently. The ones that leave you standing there wondering when the last ordinary moment happened.

The kind where you once joked about getting old together.
About dying together.
About haunting your enemies if one of you went first—and haunting each other if necessary, just to keep things fair.

The jokes weren’t jokes, really.
They were assumptions.
Certainty disguised as humor.

There’s a strange guilt that comes with surviving something that mattered.
With being okay again.
With laughing in a life that once included someone who no longer fits the same way.

You start asking yourself if moving forward is a kind of forgetting.
If building something new means you’re disloyal to what came before.

It doesn’t.

You’re allowed to carry history and keep going.
You’re allowed to miss people without needing them back in the same place.
You’re allowed to honor what was without turning it into a wound that never closes.

Some connections don’t end because they failed.
They end because they did what they were meant to do.

They taught you how to love deeply.
How to trust.
How to show up fully.

And when that season is over, the lesson doesn’t disappear just because the proximity does.

If you’re reading this and trying to make peace with a friendship that no longer looks the way it used to—
you’re not behind.
You’re not cold.
You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re just standing at the point where gratitude and grief overlap.

That’s not weakness.
That’s maturity.

And maybe you don’t grow old together the way you planned.
Maybe you don’t haunt the same enemies anymore.

But I like to think the rules still apply.
That somewhere down the line, one of us is absolutely going to show up uninvited—
just to make sure the other is doing okay.

What I know now is this:

Some people aren’t meant to stay forever.
But they’re meant to stay with you—
in who you became because of them.

— A.S. Thorne 🖤