There is a quiet kind of grief few people speak about. It arrives the moment you sit across from someone you once loved dearly and realize the person you remember no longer lives there.

Their face is familiar. Their voice is the same. But something essential has quietly changed. You search for the laughter you once knew, the ease you once shared, the feeling of coming home in their presence. Instead, you meet a stranger wearing a familiar name. Time has a way of changing us all. We shed old dreams, old fears, old versions of ourselves.

Sometimes we grow together.

Sometimes we grow apart. And perhaps that is one of life’s gentlest heartbreaks ~

understanding that you will […]