People Come and Go

By  GRACE YANG ‘27

“Are they cute or are they Exeter cute?”

I never expected a quote dropped at the “Health Relationship Workshop for Lowers” would inspire me to write something — the casual question seemed to be a confrontation to desperate souls at Exeter. With Valentine’s Day following closely behind,  the flood of Instagram stories felt like a punch, solidifying the emotions of those searching for something— or rather, someone—to hold onto.

The core of the questions strikes as a reminder for Exonians to tear off the mask of exaggerated emotions molded by circumstance.  I always say we’re not really your typical teenagers; we’re more like ones navigating the complexities of wearing the coat of maturity in a mini-societal simulation. Independence drives our actions yet watching people around you find the shoulder they’re able to lean on magnifies your loneliness. As impulsiveness drives our brains, we tend to filter our preexisting standards and ignore the red flags to purposely match someone who’s checking off the box. 

But that also leaves the question for the majority: Why aren’t you in a relationship? Perhaps it’s because you’re not interested, perhaps it’s the right person but the wrong time, perhaps you don’t have time, or perhaps you’re afraid. Afraid of losing them.

People come and go.

“I think an epiphany I had recently is that not everyone is just like you — and I mean value-wise and habit-wise — and that’s okay,” Lucy recently said on my radio show.

A recurring theme when it comes to losing a friend often trails down to clashing values, a problem that has been tucked beneath the relationship since the beginning. Expectations, the silent killers of connection, turn disappointment into betrayal. We feel cheated when someone we adore doesn’t live up to the subconscious standards we built for them. From the constant utterances of “it’s not that deep” and the last-minute cancellations to watching them procrastinate on a project you worked on together, disappointment rushes through our veins, but moments like snowball fights and laughing until your stomachache forcefully stop all negativity. So why endure the pain of losing them when we can gaslight ourselves? Perhaps this is an example of “an unhealthy relationship.”

Hey, I haven’t seen you in a long time.

The time difference between the States and China is 13 hours — an unyielding reminder that day and night are always flipped. Living here feels like existing out of sync with home, always trailing behind like a shadow trying to catch up to the light. News, celebrations, and life updates drift to me across time zones, arriving long after the echoes of laughter have faded. I’m always 13 hours late, always responding to messages that feel like fragments of a life that continue without me.

Eventually, I started withdrawing from social media, slipping into a quiet disappearance like one of those characters who mysteriously vanish in the early chapters of a story. Time did its job by consuming me in Exeter’s life and building another close-knit community. But time also has a way of building distance beyond miles. No matter how many hugs were shared, how many late-night talks were whispered under the stars, or how many core memories we crafted together, the changing season and passing of time inevitably widened the already 7,055-mile gap between us.

Hey, I haven’t seen you in a long time.

The time difference between Dunbar and other dorms on campus is zero hours, yet my message seems to be lost in the Wi-Fi connection. Disappointment washes over us when our energy is never reciprocated. Through self-respect, it’s hard, but we perform our grand finale and exit from one’s life. No matter how late we’ve stayed up texting, how loud we’ve laughed together, and how many secrets we’ve exchanged while getting Vs, we just don’t vibe with certain individuals. We smoothen our edges while embracing every conflict by covering the problem with a coat of forgiveness, almost as if a sorry and a hug would do their deed. 

But some distances aren’t measured in hours or miles; they’re built in silences, in the moments we stop trying, in the hesitation before hitting send. There’s a certain kind of loneliness in standing side by side with someone and realizing you no longer know how to reach them. The realization stings at first — that the people who once felt at home now feel like strangers wearing familiar faces. At some point, we stop chasing. We stop making excuses for one-sided efforts and stop justifying the constant tug-of-war between presence and absence. Distance isn’t just about geography — it’s about the slow erosion of familiarity, the way once distinct voices blur into background noise, the fact that people we once searched in crowds are now unrecognizable, and the realization that some bridges can’t withstand the tides of time. 

Maybe forever was a word meant for memories, not people.

I tell myself this over and over, carving it into my heart as if repetition could numb the ache of losing the ones who once felt irreplaceable. I blame it on the instability of the human heart—on the way we love so deeply only to let go so easily. On the coldhearted people, I valued beyond their care, on the way they walked away as if our shared moments were nothing but passing scenery. Perhaps erasing them is the only way to make peace with their absence—ignoring them on the paths we once walked together, deleting our selfies, blocking their numbers, rewriting our stories to pretend they were never main characters to begin with. A programmed way of cleansing our lives, like hitting unfollow on Instagram. But the mind isn’t as obedient as an algorithm.

Because their names still carry weight. They still linger in the spaces they once occupied, in the syllables of old inside jokes, in the echoes of laughter that once belonged to us. And when their names slip into conversation, uninvited and unexpected, they bring back a flood of resentment, anger, and even heartbreak.

Some hold grudges. Some let time do its job. But either way, the ones we lost never truly leave. There will always be late nights when caffeine keeps us awake, when nostalgia creeps in unannounced, and when we stare at the ceiling and replay moments we swore we had moved on from. No matter how many seasons pass and no matter how many new faces fill our present, we are still tethered to our past by the weight of those who once mattered.

And that’s the cruel thing about memory — it doesn’t ask for permission. It resurfaces unbidden, forcing us to confront the ghosts of people who have long since disappeared from our lives. No matter how much time stretches between then and now, we can’t rewind and edit them out of the memories we painted together. Even as we age into grandparents, telling stories of our high school years, their names will slip through our lips like an old song we thought we had forgotten.

People come and go, but memories stay forever.