When you’re a teenager, every friendship feels like it’s going to last forever. These are the people who get every late-night text, every overshare, every tiny crisis blown up to full-scale soap opera. It feels like the universe shrinks down to your group chat and anyone falling out means the sky is actually falling. Most people swear these bonds are for life, like friendship is some kind of tattoo.

But most friendships at that age are more like scribbles in pencil. Sure, everything feels huge and dramatic, but time blurs faces and inside jokes into the background pretty quickly as soon as real life starts moving in faster. Suddenly, it’s not only okay but completely normal that friends drift off, turn into a faded username or just stories you’ll laugh about someday. As life picks up speed, the people who always needed you for their own drama end up on silent, and the emotional weight they brought loses all its hold. The friendships that stick are the ones that don’t feel like a job.