Friendship Day arrives with colourful frames, WhatsApp forwards, and sugary posts. But somewhere between the filters and captions lies a raw, beautiful, imperfect truth about friendship we rarely talk about. Today, I want to write about that kind.

In today's world, friendship is often shown by tagging each other in photos, clicking selfies, posting on social media, and all that. But the real friendship lies in the one who was not in the photos, but always in life.

I still remember how Friendship Day used to be celebrated in our childhood. Everybody came with bundles of friendship ribbons, friendship bands, friendship rings, and many more. We used to tie these friendship bands to everyone—even teachers—and at home, we used to show parents how many friends we had. That friendship was something special.

“We didn’t know what loyalty meant, but we lived it anyway.” That friendship carried no expectations, no judgment—just shared food, fights, and fun. “We didn’t know what loyalty meant, but we lived it anyway.”

But how things change as we grow up. Friendship becomes more complex with age, distance, misunderstandings, busy lives, and how we often drift apart from people we once thought were ‘forever.’ The friends we saw every day, shared benches and lunchboxes, are now the people we text occasionally. The promises of “forever” that we made as kids, with stars in our eyes and bands on our wrists, slowly dissolve into the quiet spaces of adulthood.

It's not always about the fight and misunderstandings, but due to life, career, work, and studies. We begin to understand that friendship is not about having daily phone calls and frequent hangouts anymore. It's about efforts. About choosing the one even with many obstacles and hurdles.

Some friends grow with us, evolve with us, but some friends remain frozen. They only remain with us for a few chapters of life, and then we have to make a distance even when it hurts.

There’s a strange grief in letting go of a friend. It’s not as loud as heartbreak, but it lingers longer.

People don’t talk much about friendship, but they shape us. They teach us what we value in others—and ourselves.

But in all this life cycle, there are always a few friends who stay with us no matter what happens. These are the ones who never need daily calls or texts to stay updated. These are the ones with fewer photos but more memories. They have seen every stage of our lives—how we grow, how we fall. They were always a silent side support that no one talked about.

The magic of a friend lies in the comfort of having someone who"gets you." They are the ones with whom we laughed harder, cried harder. We shared our life problems. We shared everything about life that was eating us.

With them, you don’t need to fake energy or filter emotions. The friends who never had the awkward silence, true laughs, and many more. I remember a time I couldn’t even articulate what I was feeling, and all they said was, “I’m here.” No advice. No forceful motivation. Just presence. That moment healed something in me I didn’t know was broken.

What makes these friendships last isn’t just shared memories—it’s shared truth. The truth of who we are, stripped of performance. These friends don’t always have loud roles in our stories, but they are the quiet constants. The underlined words. The safe spaces.

In a world that celebrates loud love and performative bonds, the ones who stay quietly are the ones who truly matter.

Today, friendship means something deeper than it did a year ago. It's no longer about how many times we meet, how many times we text, how many jokes we shared. It's about the presence—the one who doesn't always show but always exists. It's about having the confidence that no matter what happens in life, this person will always be by my side.

Not everyone I called a friend stayed in my life, and that hurts. But I understood that’s life. But now I realise: not all friendships are meant to last forever—some come to teach, some to heal, and a few, very few, to stay. And those who stayed… they’re the ones who taught me what true friendship feels like.

Real friendship isn’t loud, but it's silent. It does not seek validation—it seeks sincerity. It just needs truth, trust, and time.

So on this Friendship Day, I want to say thank you. To the friends who left, you taught me lessons I needed. To the friends who stayed, you are my constants. And to the memories we made together, you are part of who I am.

.    .    .