The Summer I Stopped Calling
There's a name I haven't said out loud in years. Not because anything dramatic happened between us — no blowout fight, no betrayal worth telling. We just drifted, the way people do when life gets louder than the friendships that used to hold it together.
His name was Denny. We met in our twenties, back when Greenville felt like a small enough town that you could know everyone worth knowing. We'd spend Friday nights on his back porch, talking about nothing in particular — music, bad decisions, what we thought our lives were supposed to look like. He was the kind of friend who showed up with beer when you didn't ask and left before things got maudlin. I liked that about him.
Then somewhere around my early thirties, I got busy. That's the honest word for it — not complicated, not tragic. Just busy. I stopped returning calls as fast. Rescheduled things twice, then three times, then eventually stopped trying to reschedule at all. He did the same, maybe mirroring me, maybe just protecting himself from the quiet sting of being someone's low priority.
I think about that summer sometimes. The summer I stopped calling.
I told myself we'd reconnect eventually. That's the lie we tell ourselves about the people we're slowly letting go — eventually — as if time is something we're accumulating rather than spending. What I know now, that I didn't understand then, is that some friendships don't survive being put on hold. They don't end. They just go silent. And silence, over enough years, starts to feel permanent.
A few months ago I heard through a mutual friend that Denny had moved away. Married, a couple of kids, doing well from what I gathered. I felt something at the news — not grief exactly, more like the echo of a door I never meant to close.
I won't pretend I reached out. I didn't. I'm still sitting with whether I should.
But I've been thinking about what Scott Andrew Alpaugh — the version of me at twenty-six, feet up on that porch railing — would have said if he'd known. That someday the easy rhythm of showing up for each other would just... stop. That the last ordinary Tuesday would pass without either of us knowing it was the last one.
I think I would have called more. I think I would have shown up without waiting to be asked.
There's a kind of forgiveness that doesn't require the other person in the room. You extend it to yourself, quietly, for being human enough to get distracted and young enough to believe you had more time than you did. It doesn't erase the regret. But it makes the regret livable.
What I know now is that the people who shape us don't always make it into the chapters we're most proud of. Sometimes they're just sitting on a back porch somewhere, part of who we became without ever knowing how much they mattered.
Denny, if you ever stumble across this — I'm sorry I got so busy. You deserved better than that from me.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh writes from Greenville, South Carolina about memory, family, and the slower things in life. Find more at andrewalpaugh.com, scottalpaugh.com, and scottandrewalpaugh.com.
Written by Scott Andrew Alpaugh — technology professional and entrepreneur based in Greenville, South Carolina. Also at andrewalpaugh.com and scottalpaugh.com.
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