An Ode to the Ones We Left Behind.

There’s a kind of goodbye that doesn’t announce itself. No tears. No slammed doors. Just the gentle kind, the one that happens slowly, almost naturally, like how rivers split and flow in different directions. Some people we part from because we had to. Others, we just… outgrew. No drama, no bitterness only life shifting in ways we didn’t expect. And so, we found ourselves walking different paths.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. About how everything, everyone is fleeting. How the laughter that once echoed daily becomes something we remember only when an old photo resurfaces. How the voices we once heard every night before sleeping now exist only in archived chats and half-faded memories. We don’t talk enough about the people we consciously leave behind. The ones we let go of not because we stopped loving them, but because staying would’ve meant shrinking ourselves. Because the conversations grew quieter, the connection stretched thinner and at some point, we both silently agreed, this was it.

There’s a strange kind of grief in that. It doesn’t come with closure. It doesn’t announce itself like death. It lingers in the quiet, in songs we skip now, in places we avoid revisiting, in birthdays we remember but don’t message for.

And yet, there’s no anger. Just a soft ache. A quiet acceptance.

We’re all moving, all changing and no one stays in the same chapter forever. That’s the beauty and cruelty of it. Life is not a holding space. It’s a flow. And in that flow, people drift apart. Some are taken by time. Some by choice. Some by silence. Some by the simple fact that they were only meant to walk with us for a while.

To those we left behind not out of cruelty but necessity, this is for you.

You mattered.
You helped shape a version of us that we had to eventually outgrow.

Here’s to the fleeting, the forgotten and the fond.
Here’s to all the people we once called home.
Here’s to the ones we left behind.