As resilient as I experience myself to be in so many situations, as good as I am at drawing a thick silver lining around an otherwise dark moment, there is one particular version of life’s pains that I feel weak and stupid about processing: severed friendships. Throughout my life I’ve had a few very dear friends that either drifted away on an ever more quickly moving river of miscommunication and disappointment, until I couldn’t see them anymore, or vanished in one fell swoop — as if abducted by alien invaders.