Sad How Some Friendships Never Ever Seem To End

When someone has been around long enough, you stop evaluating them in the present tense. They become inherited. They come with sediment. They arrive in your mind padded by old jokes, old stories, old loyalties, old rescue missions, old pain, old context. You are meeting the archive. And the archive makes people easier to excuse.

A man you have known for thirty years can be selfish, misogynistic, emotionally stunted, casually cruel, exhausting, incapable of self-reflection, and somehow still remain legible to you as “my old friend.” A man with those exact same qualities, walking into your life cold at fifty-one, would be dead on arrival. You would spot the rot immediately. You would go home, text someone, and say, absolutely not, I’m never seeing that guy again.

That gap interests me.

— “Grandfathered In,” Lyle W Fass