My Closest Friend Ghosted Me and I Never Found Out Why

Prerna and I had been close since our first week at college in Mumbai - the kind of close that forms early because you are both slightly lost and find each other funny, and then deepens over years of shared experience until the friendship is woven into how you understand your own history.

By our late twenties we were in different cities - I had moved to Bengaluru for work - but maintained the friendship with the regularity and ease of people who do not need to be in the same place to be genuinely in each other's lives.

When the messages started coming less frequently I attributed it to a difficult period she had mentioned - a stressful project, some family tension. I gave her space without making it feel like withdrawal, which is a balance I was careful about. The space I gave her became, over about three months, the new normal.

My messages were read but not replied to. Then they were not replied to and I could see they were being read. Then I could no longer see whether they were being read. One call went to voicemail. Then several.

At five months I sent a message asking directly if I had done something and expressing that I would rather know than not know. No response. At seven months I reached out through a mutual friend who said, with the visible discomfort of someone caught between two people, that she did not know what had happened either but that Prerna seemed fine.

I stopped reaching at eight months because continuing felt like something I could not sustain with any dignity. I have not heard from her in three years. I am 30 and I still do not know what happened.

I want to be honest about what that costs: not knowing is its own specific kind of grief with a quality that the grief of a clean ending does not have. Clean endings hurt but they resolve.

A friendship that simply stops without explanation leaves an open loop in your understanding of yourself - a question about what you did or were that you cannot answer because you were not given the information.

What I have arrived at, slowly and imperfectly, is an acceptance that some questions about other people's choices do not get answered, and that my inability to close the loop does not mean the answer is about me. I miss her and I have stopped waiting to understand it.