Do you remember?

One of the most pleasant surprises you can have as you get older is that life still grants you the ability to make new friends. Friendships born in middle age are—I would say—less tender, less sentimental, more serenely chosen, and perhaps for that reason, freer.

Our new friends, who, like us, are now facing the third stage of life, are not bound by shared memories nor tied by the weight of so many years of relationship: it is a friendship we choose and renew every day.

Similarly, one of the most profoundly painful surprises you can experience upon reaching sixty is losing a friendship you took for granted, considering it had been with you "all your life." I tend to believe, with that naiveté that the years haven't diminished, that when affection has endured over time, it's because its foundation is so solid that it would take a true earthquake to shake it.

But tectonic plates, as we know, always maintain a certain level of activity; there are tensions and shifts, and sometimes, an earthquake eventually occurs.

Losing an old friend should be very painful. And it truly is—the feeling of failure and loss is inevitable—but perhaps not as much as in other stages of life. Precisely because, as we were saying, we are aware that years of erosion have been necessary to eventually damage what seemed unbreakable. The most colossal rocks and the most granitic mountains end up showing the wear and tear of two seemingly less powerful elements: water and wind.

When you realize one day that an unbridgeable distance has grown with a lifelong friend, you also realize—practically at the same time—that in reality, the corrosion had been doing its work for a long time in the form of misunderstanding, disappointment, or betrayal.

And that's when the years you have—many of them—come to your aid. Because you've already assimilated that phrase by Mercè Rodoreda: "I have cultivated forgetting everything that has seemed harmful to my soul and I have cultivated admiration for the things that do me good."

Reflecting, I've remembered these past few days some of the great novels I've read about friendship. From the saga Two friends from Ferrante to The inseparable onesThe novel that Simone de Beauvoir was reluctant to publish because she considered it too intimate—about her friendship with Zaza Lacoin—and which her daughter finally decided to share with us. From young Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry to the old friends of The last meeting by Sándor Márai.

And then I remember Variable cloudiness, by Carmen Martín Gaite, and the story of the friendship between Sofía and Mariana, and that phrase I jotted down in some notebook in that pointless exercise I've been doing all my life: saving phrases from books I've liked. (Pointless because—although my memory isn't the best—I usually remember the phrases that have impacted me without needing to consult my notes.) The protagonist of Variable cloudiness: "We don't realize how wonderful it is to be able to ask someone, "Do you remember?", and notice that yes, they do remember.".

Suddenly I realize that everything I've said up until now is worthless and that losing a lifelong friend still hurts.