A friend (F39) ghosted me (F38) more than a decade back and we are suddenly in regular contact now. I am having some difficulty processing this. How should I look at this renewed relationship?

We were very good friends for four years more than a decade back and we would talk regularly, four or five times a week. She shifted to a different city for health reasons and we were in regular touch for a year or so after that as well, still talking to each other with the same frequency. She did not have too many friends and the only two common friends that we shared were not really that good friends with her anyways.

Then one fine day, out of the blue, she stopped answering my phone calls. A dozen text messages later I got a reply attributing this to bad cell phone reception.

In a month or two her number was disconnected. I was not aware that it would be disconnected and I did not get the new number.

Soon I shifted cities too.

The daily conversations went to once or twice in a couple of months, over email.

In sometime, it went down to one reply to a bunch of my emails, once a year and then once in two or four years and then nothing.

From 2015 to 2018, I did not know whether she used that email anymore, which city she was in, which country she was in.... and I kept on missing her once in a while. And I still kept sending her an occasional email once in a year. Neither of us have used social media, at least as far as I know.

We randomly got in touch (through an Internet forum) again in 2019 and I started getting occasional replies.

During the pandemic we exchanged phone numbers and started talking more regularly. Now we talk or message once a week or even more.

But I still don’t understand what happened so many years back. It wasn’t that we were some school friends who drifted apart.

I don’t need to know why she ghosted me, I can understand, she must have had her compelling reasons. May be what she did was not ghosting, I am not sure. However, it did hurt me a little and cause me a lot of sadness back then and sometimes even over the years. But from not knowing if she is even on this planet anymore to talking regularly is very difficult for me to process. Also, so much has happened in my life over the years when we were not speaking and I am sure so much must have happened in her life too.

While she sort of apologised once for not replying to so many of my emails, otherwise she behaves normally as if nothing happened.

I also worry that she might ghost me again. At times I do feel that I must have acted stupidly those many years ago which made her completely stop talking to me.

Sorry about the long post.

TL;DR! One of my closest friends ghosted me around 15 years back or I believe she ghosted me and now suddenly she is back in my life. I am very confused and not able to understand her behaviour.

Submitted February 26, 2021 at 01:47AM by bravozerobravoalpha https://ift.tt/2MragUb