IV. The people in your life will come and go.

This knowledge is, for some grotesque reason, a lot easier to conceptualize within the context of death, I think. We all know we all are going to die. We don’t know who will just fade away out of the focus of our lives while we’re still alive. It’s almost a sadder task to look at your current cast of characters and imagine anyone would phase out, because unlike death which is a guaranteed, there’s no guaranteed fate of our relationships. We can sense these points are going to happen, though; school will end, you could move cities, you’ll switch jobs. People to whom you are so close you can’t imagine a life without them will seem like pit stops on a bigger road trip as you look out into the rearview mirror. It is surreal to be so close to people but have them exit your life through circumstance or a natural growing apart, because it is hard to imagine.

When someone brings so much meaning to your life, how could you imagine that that could, at some point in the mysterious future, cease to be the case? The difficulty of envisioning that I think brings the biggest heartbreak, because when it happens—when you move away, when they change or disappoint you, when things just aren’t the same anymore—you have no precedent of imagination to protect you from that pain. There was no preparation to find out that best friends aren’t forever. That marriages can fail. That parents can drift away, so can you, so can siblings. Sometimes, people just leave, and you leave people, too.

The guilt hits hardest when you realize that all the conveniences of digital life are still not always enough to see us through. Like, HAGS and LYLAS was a lie invented by the Lifetouch Yearbook Corporation to sell feelings of permanence in fleeting times, and all you got to show for it was this book defaced with meaningless scribbles in colored Sharpie!!! Even ubiquitous social technologies can’t keep you and your senior year best friend in touch when you move to different universities. The existence of systems whose entire design is to keep us connected can have a way of making you feel like you’ve failed, given all the resources at your disposal. Then you have all this compounding guilt.

You’ll get over the guilt through some time-tested, classic stuff Zen-hood: through putting trust in change. Sometimes we do fail at maintaining our relationships, because we neglect folks when they need us most, or we aren’t giving in equal measure to what we’re receiving. To be able to accept that people will drift in and out of our lives is not to say that we are fail-proof in relationships, just that life is made up of eras, and those chapters can stand alone if someone doesn’t make it through the whole story. A respect for temporality is a gift of honesty to the folks who are most important to you: You have to love the fleeting influences of others in your life to love those influences at all. When people change and you do not like the new version, cherish the fact that you got the vintage edition to sit in your life’s china cabinet of collected meaningful mementos.