Cancer

Some relationships change their shape so gradually that the shift feels like weather rather than an event, and by the time you notice it, you are already living inside the new version. The conversations have gotten shorter, or the silences have gotten longer, or the person who used to text first now waits for you to text first. You keep thinking you should bring it up, but bringing it up means naming what you might lose in the naming. The care you feel for this person has not changed, but the way you carry that care has started to require more effort, and effort of this particular kind is its own kind of information.