My mum coached me on how to lose friends when I was a teenager. She taught me how to drift out of other people’s lives so that they, eventually, stopped contacting me and forgot I existed. She taught me how to appear boring to friends depending on what they were interested in, or how to act clingier than I really was so that the other person would be the one who would try to get rid of me. I didn’t really have to apply many of Mum’s lessons, though, because I never really had many friends to lose in the first place. Only, really, Ye-Ye. Friends I made during art college knew me so little, since I never spent time with them outside lectures, that I was already, from the beginning, forgettable, and I doubt any of them actually ever even called me a friend, just an acquaintance, or a peer, most likely.

“You are a different species. You think they won’t notice you not aging? When they are thirty and you are still just how you look now? When they are forty, fifty? Any friendships are a lie from the start,” my mum told me when coaching me on how to lose Ye-Ye, and I was protesting. “And, anyway, Lyds, everything in everyone’s life is temporary. It’s just that you will feel those things are more temporary than others because your life is so long. So, it’s not something to cry about.”

Nonetheless, purposely drifting away from Ye-Ye, who I had shared so much with, growing up, made me feel like I was being cruel to her. She wasn’t the kind of person who would cut a friend out of their life simply because that friend wasn’t responding or had been quiet for a while, which my mum said a surprising number of people do. Ye-Ye cared about me. Every day, at first, when I stopped contacting her, she would message to see if I was okay; then she checked every week, then every couple of months. This message I’ve received today is the first in a couple of years. When I told my mum in the past that Ye-Ye still got in touch with me, my mum said, “Just imagine she is dead. That those texts are your imagination.” I close Instagram and lock my phone. What my mum taught me about friendship is one of few things that I know to be completely true. People—aging and mortal—are like flowers, seasonal, wilting and finite; while I’m like a tree.