You will never be more wanted than you are in November. It is somewhere between the final appointments with friends and the catch ups with those forgotten that you begin to know your worth. People will pull you from the fringes of their lives during this time. I know that if I act now, then someone I’ve said little to will be coming with me into next year. It might look, smell and taste like we’re done, but I don’t think so. There’s no reason why we should be, because there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be.

I am conscious of the annual urge to hoard people at about this time every year, but it’s hard to resist. It’s difficult to be ‘unkind’, and to stop viewing the act of letting people go as such. It’s never felt more foolhardy to do it, in an era where holding onto everyone you’ve ever known is thoroughly encouraged. When I am online, I am consuming my past and the people that are in it as if they’re still fresh, even when I’m unaware of what I am doing, even when I can’t feel myself swallowing. Being intentional has never felt more hostile in the age of passivity. 

I probably would’ve wondered what everyone is up to, still, I don’t have to ask to know the beauty of it, I can see it from where I am standing. I can see the inside of a typical day in the life of someone I barely knew nine years ago, I can even discuss it with them. That level of access has no obvious feeling attached, aside from the slight warmth that comes with what is easy. It requires thought to regard it as blurring and irritating to the psyche. Social media is illusory, we know it and we live with it– knowing someone and knowing them for years, yet not really knowing, and being uninspired by how long you’ve been involuntarily familiar; being unable to define the people we amass digitally, not being aware of a desire to, yet remaining creatures of categorisation. Something is constantly being rubbed instead of itched by our lives online. We resist when we begin to feel people leaving our physical worlds, because we know it is like losing them. So we fight before this happens, by any means necessary.

When I left my job this year I barely added anyone online, which meant when I left, I really did leave. It was my last stint in retail, my last ‘communal’ job. I don’t miss it, I can be honest about that, but when I think about it, I think about the connections. When relationships are really over, it’s hard to know how you feel about them. I leant into it and exaggerated some aspects, so that I could find something to call what I felt. When I’d found something to call it, I could do something about it. I could categorise it, and assign a response.

“We categorise everything because it has proven itself to be a good strategy in order to survive,” said a Quora user with 106.5M answer views, “the hard part is to find out when categorisation is useful and when it does more harm than it helps.”

There was little I could do, other than sit and feel, until the longing was not longing, and became reminiscence instead, as it likely always had been. I shouldn’t haul them along with me only because I think of my old colleagues from time to time. It would’ve been quite easy to let the soft, hazardless relationships run on and on for as long as I was capable; almost as easy as it is to justify the relationships that count for more, the ones that need little dressing up. It is hard to let people fall away naturally, it is as mean as it is to believe in a future that needs the space. It is polite to go on gathering dead skin.