there are certain friendships that don't feel like friendships. they feel like siblings you somehow found instead of inherited. that's what it was with her. not in the dramatic, inseparable way, well yes — but just in the steady, everyday closeness that built itself without effort. we grew around each other, the way people do when they share too much time, too many jokes, too many versions of themselves. same instinct to share things before they fully made sense.

and then she moved back to Tokyo.

there wasn't a dramatic goodbye. no promises carved into stone. just luggage, a flight, and the quiet understanding that distance rearranges things whether you want it or not. she left, and life kept going — hers over there, mine still here — and somehow that was the part that surprised me the most. how normal it felt. how undramatic. we both went into it with the idea of me being back in Tokyo a lot anyways.

i didn't lose her. at least, i kind of did. nothing happened in that sense. but something shifted in the space between us, and not in a way that needs fixing. time zones do something to connection; they stretch it, thin it out, make every exchange a little softer, a little slower. the every day closeness we had couldn't survive the geography. and that's not anyone's fault. it's just what happens when one person starts a new life in a city that pulls them forward. a lot. and the other stays behind in a life that feels familiar.

the grief isn't sharp or sadness. but different. knowing that someone you care about still exists in their full living way but with a quiet boundary neither of us ever acknowledged out loud. it appeared one day, and we both instinctively stayed on our own side of it.

sometimes i'll see something that reminds me of her — a song we used to overplay, a joke only she would get, a moment I know she would've laughed at. and for a second, it feels like she's still close. but the moment passes, and the distance settles again, uncomplicated, factual.

she's building a life in Tokyo now. one with new routines, new people, new rhythms I'm not part of. and I'm building mine here, in the same city where our friendship lived its whole lifespan. we didn't choose different paths deliberately — life and, i would say people, nudged us into separate directions and we listened.

and the strange part is: i imagine myself ending up in tokyo too. soon. not in a chasing-her way, just in the quiet, long-term sense of knowing where i feel most alive. it's a place every year i go back i picture that future more times than i admit out loud. but even with that, it doesn't feel like her life is waiting for me there. whatever she's creating belongs entirely to her. whatever i might find one day would have to belong entirely to me.

i think that's the bittersweetness of it — the idea that we might end up in the same city again, ye not in the same story. that two versions of ''Tokyo'' can exist at the same time; hers, already unfolding; mine, still theoretical, still somewhere ahead of me. and even if our paths cross again, when i would go back again, i know it won't be in the way it once was. not because there's anything wrong between us, but because we became different people in different places, and distance made sure of that.

but there is something peaceful about accepting that. not tragic but honest. friendships don't always survive geography, timing or growth — but that doesn't erase the versions of us that did exist, in the city we shared, in the time when it made sense.

she was like a sister to me. i don't think that will change. but sisterhood doesn't always mean permanence. sometimes it's a phase of your life that held you when you needed it, and then gently let go when the world opened somewhere else.

i don't hold the friendship tightly anymore. i just carry it — lightly, quietly — the way you carry something that mattered and still does, even if it belongs to a past version of both of you.

distance didn't ruin anything. it rearranged it.

i wish it was different, though.