Dear friends I don’t talk to anymore,

We don’t talk anymore, but there are mornings when I return to the house we built. And I still walk past it in my mind sometimes.

Its walls remain intact, but the air is stale now, silting in the corners like dust left unswept. The lights, once an ethereal honeyed gold, have surrendered to silence. I press my hand on the doorknob and feel the faint residue of us. I can’t remember who left first. 

I don’t think we ever realize, in the moment, that we’re saying goodbye for good. We imagine distance as temporary—a few missed texts, a forgotten plan—but not as the gradual dismantling of something that once felt infinite. It’s almost comical how permanence fools us, how we believe certain people are unlosable simply because we cannot fathom losing them. 

Lately, my mind has been lingering on simple inquiries. Are you taller than me now? Would you shave your head for a million dollars? I find myself clinging to questions that expect nothing in return. They drift through my precalculus-crowded, chemistry-filled mind, little paper boats on a flood of formulas and deadlines.

But the questions never stay small. By the time I’m sitting in the back of my Humanities classroom, they’ve begun to warp and stretch, unfurling across the floor in shifting, dizzying patterns, like the morning sun does through the threadbare shades that leak gold onto Mrs. O’s desk. 

In that light, I see Icarus—the boy haloed in radiant ruin. He rises, luminous and fragile, until the sky itself seems to wane beneath his touch. Then, with a shudder, he fractures, spilling into the sea. The myth does not drift above me. It descends, settling into the quiet space beside my desk. 

Around me, voices bloom in soft discord, the sound of my classmates debating his hubris, his hunger, his heat. Pride, they say. Foolishness, they insist. 

But my silence swells thick in my throat; I can only think of the fall. It was his fall, I realize, that sculpted his flight into form. Had he not fallen, would we have remembered him at all? Would he be anything more than a passing anecdote? Perhaps, without the surrender, his wings would have been mere ornament, his soaring nothing more than a rehearsal for the inevitable. 

You may wonder why I’m telling you this, but it was in that moment that I realized something: a fall is not merely an error in judgment but the moment that transforms action into narrative. It is the point at which experience crystallizes into memory, and memory into truth. Icarus didn’t become immortal because of his flight. In a paradox almost cruel, he lives because he died. 

You should know that at night, I lie awake, watching as the questions grow larger, swirling in the dark until they tower over me. With every answer I attempt, I become Sisyphus—condemned to push a stone up the endless slope of my own unfinished thoughts. I strain and struggle, forcing each question to the summit of that mountain of ‘almost’s and ‘what-if’s, only to watch it tumble back down again. 

It rolls and rolls, faster each time, until it finds its way to the doorstep of our abandoned house, the very place I had been trying to push it away from. 

It knocks once against the empty doorframe, echoing through all the rooms we once filled. As I descend, chasing the stone I can never master, I finally understand the cruelty of my task: the question I can’t outrun. 

So instead, I ask it plainly. Had we not fallen, if our wings had held, would we have felt anything more than a fleeting glimpse of something bright and unreachable? I step inside, and the familiar spaces stretch around me, greeting me with soundlessness. 

And in that stillness, I begin to understand. 

Not every house has to be lived in forever. Some are meant to shelter us for a while, to teach us what belonging feels like before we learn to find it elsewhere.

And so, in my mind, I leave the porch light burning. Not as an invitation, but as an acknowledgement. The air still remembers us, I think. And that’s enough. 

Signed, 

A friend you no longer know