There is something strange about growing up.
Between fifteen and thirty, you meet so many people who feel permanent.
You meet the friend you think you’ll grow old with. The person you believe you’ll love forever. The group you can’t imagine leaving. The person who knows everything about you.
And then, somehow, life changes.
People move away.
Friendships become conversations once a year.
Someone you spoke to every day becomes someone you don’t speak to at all.
The person you once couldn’t imagine living without becomes a stranger whose name occasionally crosses your mind.
Did you not go through these?
And for a while, it hurts.
Because we mistake closeness for permanence.
We think that because someone is important to us today, they must have been sent to stay forever.
But not everyone is.
Some people arrive to walk with you through a particular version of yourself.
And when that version of you ends, sometimes the relationship ends with it.
That’s not always betrayal.
Sometimes it’s simply life.
You are changing.
They are changing.
Your values change. Your priorities change. Your dreams change. The things you once had in common slowly become things you remember having in common.
And that’s one of the hardest lessons of growing up:
Not everyone you love is meant to accompany you into every chapter.
Some people are chapters.
Some are paragraphs.
Some are only a sentence you remember years later.
But that doesn’t make their presence meaningless.
Maybe that friend taught you how to trust.
Maybe that person who broke your heart taught you what you should never tolerate again.
Maybe someone you knew for only a few months changed the direction of your entire life.
We want every beautiful connection to last.
But sometimes its purpose was never to last.
It was simply to matter.
I think that’s what makes this age so beautiful and so painful at the same time.
You’re meeting people while you’re still becoming yourself.
And sometimes you don’t realize you’re growing apart from someone because you don’t even realize how much you’ve grown.
One day, you look around and notice that the people you once spoke to every day are no longer part of your ordinary life.
And strangely, you are okay.
Not because you stopped caring.
But because you finally understood that caring for someone doesn’t always mean keeping them.
There are people you will love who will not stay.
There are people you will lose without either of you doing anything wrong.
There are people who were perfect for one chapter and completely wrong for the next.
And maybe that’s okay.
We don’t have to turn every ending into a tragedy.
Some endings are simply evidence that the story moved forward.
So, between fifteen and thirty, don’t be surprised if you meet a lot of temporary people.
Don’t hate them for leaving.
Don’t hate yourself for outgrowing them.
Love them for the time they were yours.
Be grateful for what they taught you.
And let them become part of the person you eventually become.
Because some people were never meant to stay.
They were meant to shape you before they left.