500 Unread Messages and Counting.

On outgrowing people who knew you best.

There's a group chat I haven't checked in four months. It has 500 unread messages. I scroll past it every day like I'm driving by the house I grew up in after someone else bought it.

We used to talk every single day, for years. It was the kind of friendship where you don't even say hello anymore, you just pick up mid-thought. Inside jokes so layered they'd need footnotes. A shared language no one else spoke.

And then one day... we just stopped. Not dramatically. There was no fight. No falling out. No villain. That's what makes it worse, actually. If someone had betrayed someone, we'd at least have a story, a reason, a clean narrative

Instead it was more like... entropy. The slow heat death of intimacy. We didn't end. We faded. Which somehow feels more insulting.

I can't even pinpoint when it happened. Someone took a little longer to respond. Then someone else stopped responding to that person. Plans got made in smaller chats. Three people hung out without telling the other four. Not maliciously though. And then it was just easier to keep doing that.

The group chat became a graveyard we were all too nostalgic to delete but too exhausted to resurrect.

Here's the thing about friend groups though—they're held together by collective effort, and the second anyone stops putting in the work, the whole structure starts cracking. And we were all so tired. Tired of being the one to suggest plans. Tired of keeping track of everyone's schedules and relationship drama. Tired of performing enthusiasm for things we'd outgrown.

We'd built this elaborate mythology about being "forever friends." The kind of people who'd be in each other's weddings, who'd vacation together in our forties, who'd have kids that grew up together. We had a whole future mapped out. Matching tattoos planned. Running bits that we swore we'd never retire.
But we forgot that mythology requires maintenance. And maintenance requires actually liking each other.

I think that was the quiet part we never said out loud. We loved the idea of the group more than we loved being in it. We loved the nostalgia, the history, the comfort of not having to explain references. But did we actually enjoy hanging out anymore? Or were we just LARPing as the friends we used to be?

There's this moment I keep coming back to. We were all together—miracle of miracles, everyone actually showed up—and we were sitting around someone's apartment, and there was this silence. Not comfortable. Not natural. Just... empty. Like we'd run out of things to say. Like we were strangers who happened to share a past. And I remember looking around the room and realizing: we don't know each other anymore.

I didn't know what anyone actually cared about. Their real problems. Their actual fears. We'd flattened each other into characters. The funny one. The responsible one. The mess. We were still performing our roles from five years ago, but none of us were those people anymore.

And maybe that's fine. Maybe that's just growing up. People change. Priorities shift. You don't owe anyone your evolution just because you shared it with them once.

But god, it's lonely. To realize the people who knew you best don't really know you at all anymore. That all that history—the trips, the nights out, the 12am deep talks—didn't actually create a foundation strong enough to survive real life.

We were good at being friends when being friends was easy. When we all lived in the same place, had the same schedules, wanted the same things. But the second life got complicated? The second someone moved, or got serious with a partner, or changed careers, or just... evolved? The whole thing started crumbling.

And no one wanted to admit it. So we kept pretending. Kept forcing hangouts that felt like obligations. Kept texting in the group chat even when it felt performative. Kept posting photos together with captions about "the best people" when really we were just clinging to what used to be true.

I think the saddest part is that we all know it's over, but we're too nostalgic to make it official. We're like a divorced couple still wearing our wedding rings. Still saying "we should go out soon" and never following through. Still reacting to each other's stories with heart emojis like that means something.

The group chat sits there. A digital monument to a friendship that collapsed under its own weight. Sometimes someone tries to revive it—"We should all get together soon!"—and a few people throw in half-hearted agreement, and then nothing happens. Because we all know the truth: we don't actually want to get together. We want to want to get together. But wanting to want something isn't the same as wanting it.

I wonder if they think about it the way I do. If they lie awake sometimes wondering where it all went wrong. If they scroll through old photos and feel that ache of mourning something that's not dead, just different. If they miss the group, or just miss being the person they were when the group still worked.

Sometimes I draft long messages, asking if anyone else feels this way. Acknowledging the weird distance. Suggesting we either commit to fixing it or admit it's broken. But I never send them. Because what if I'm the only one who cares? Or worse—what if I'm not, but everyone's too conflict-averse to be honest?

So we stay in this purgatory. Not friends, not strangers. Just people who share a history that somehow makes the present more complicated instead of easier.

I saw one of them the other day. Just ran into them. And we hugged, and we did the whole "Oh my god, how are you, we need to catch up" dance. And we both knew we wouldn't catch up. We both knew this was it. A hallway conversation that would get condensed into "I saw Sara the other day!" in some other chat with some other friends. And when I walked away, I felt relieved.

Not sad. Not nostalgic. Just... relieved. That I didn't have to pretend anymore. That I could let it be what it is: over.

Maybe friend groups aren't meant to last forever. Maybe they're just meant to serve their purpose and then dissolve. Maybe holding on to them past their expiration date is the real betrayal—not to each other, but to whoever we're becoming.

I haven't left the group chat. I probably never will. It'll just sit there, muted, a monument to something we used to be. And maybe that's enough. Maybe the history doesn't have to hold us together. Maybe it just has to exist.