You have a girl who always texts "am I home yet?" every night. Initially feeling warm. Later getting used to it, feeling normal. Then one day she forgets to text. You look at the phone, suddenly feeling missing. We are very good at taking repetitions for granted. A call every night. A reminder "eat, don't skip meals". Someone who always hears you complain without charging. Gradually, we no longer call it care, but consider it a pre-existing feature and don't need to turn it off, turn it on, just use it. Until it turns off. There are relationships that don't end in arguments, no farewells, no one is officially ungrateful to anyone. It's just that one day, messages are getting thinner. And on a normal day, you realize you have no one left to send a funny reel at 2 am anymore.
That feeling is not like being betrayed. It's like you go home and discover that your familiar chair has been removed. No one warns in advance, no one asks for permission. You stand there for a while, a bit confused, not knowing where to sit, and not knowing who to blame. People are not afraid of ungratefulness, because of ungratefulness you can even call out your name, be angry, tell friends: "He treats me like this". And the feeling of losing something you once thought was permanent, it's very strange and you can only ask yourself and then answer yourself: It's probably over!
You realize, it's not that they change too quickly, but that you are too used to them always being there. Familiar to the point of not looking closely anymore. Like a tree in front of your house, passing by every day, never looking up to see if it's still green, until one day it is cut down, you stop and see the vast void.
In the world, nothing will be there forever, unless someone actively keeps it. People leave not because their kindness runs out, but because they realize their presence is no longer of much value. Therefore, if today there is still someone asking you "are you home yet?", and someone patiently listening to you tell a story without a beginning or end, then what you should think of is that one day, they will no longer be there and you will no longer have the opportunity to realize that you once had them.
