Cancer
Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.
Virginia Woolf
The silence between you and someone who used to call regularly is not emptiness but a different kind of presence, one that arrives without announcement and settles into your week like weather. You find yourself thinking of them at odd moments, not with worry but with a quiet certainty that the distance is doing its own work. What feels like absence might be the space friendship needs to change shape, the way a room feels different when you move one piece of furniture. The connection is still there, just operating by rules you have not learned to read yet.