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There is something interesting about a certain kind of people. they are flexible in a way that makes them difficult to categorize. as if they were not built to fit into a single rule, a single system, or a single identity. I still cannot give them a perfect name, because they blend too many traits at once. they are curious, exploratory, internally alive, purposeful, often generalists, and deeply adaptive. they are not built for a narrow lane. they are built for terrain.
A friend sent a link to our group chat at midnight on the last day of 2025. I joined along with everyone else. Mahmoud was there. it had been a long time since we were all in one place, even if it was virtual. the call lasted three hours. we caught up, we laughed, we updated each other on life in the casual way people do when they pretend time has not passed.
It started with a friend (North) asking me a simple question about how I form relationships. something I had never stopped and wondered about. that led to me doing some introspection, and I wrote this at the time: Adding New Friends Systems .
Recently, a friend (North) told me something that summarized almost every failed attempt I had at explaining myself in relationships. he said although I wonder around and communicate, I am not dependent on being loved, and I am not dependent on being liked by everyone. and indeed I do not move through life chasing validation or needing reassurance that I matter.
This month I have been seeking advice from people I trust about how to handle relationships in my life. there are a few relationships I deeply care about and genuinely want to preserve. but the majority of the tension I face comes from relationships I never consciously chose. they simply happened. I would find someone assuming we were friends, while I had never said so .
I keep thinking about this. a deep, returning feeling of longing for my friend Abdalwahab. I keep imagining a scene where we are together again, in the same town where we first met, walking the same streets. I miss him more than I know how to say. he is a missing essential piece, and what I feel when I sit with his absence with this imagination of going back to the places, is something close to grief, for the years we have had to live apart, growing apart in different directions, in different places, while still carrying each other somewhere we don’t talk about enough.