Leo
Sebastian: By your patience, no. My stars shine darkly over me; the malignancy of my fate might, perhaps, distemper yours; therefore I shall carve of you your leave that I may bear my evils alone. It were a bad recompense for your love to lay any of them on you.
William Shakespeare
The quiet that has settled between you and someone you used to talk to daily is not the absence of something but the weight of everything you have stopped performing for each other. When a friendship goes silent, what dies first is not the care but the need to keep demonstrating it. You stop curating your days into stories worth sharing, stop translating your thoughts into the language that person would want to hear them in. The relief you feel at no longer having to be interesting to them is also the sadness. What remains is truer and much harder to sustain across distance.