There is a familiar saying that people come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

I understand the sentiment and I even believe it.

Some people arrive quietly and stay only a little while. Others settle themselves into the landscape of our lives so completely that eventually we cannot remember what the view looked like before them. Some are there for a summer, a difficult year, a particular job, a shared obsession or a handful of late-night conversations. Some, if we are fortunate, remain until there is no longer any choice about leaving.

We talk often about these seasons.

We talk less about what remains if they end.

Because people do not simply pass us.

They leave traces of themselves.

I think that is the part we neglect when we reassure ourselves that friendship is seasonal. We make it sound so clean. So tidy. Summer arrives, flowers bloom, autumn comes, leaves fall, winter resets everything and eventually the world begins again in time for spring.

But human beings are not trees.

We don’t shed people quite so neatly.

At least, I don’t.

Every person I develop a connection with gets a little piece of me, whether they want it or not and I don’t know how to prevent that. I’m not entirely certain I would want to.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’ve known someone for thirty years, three months or five days. Once I have opened that small door and said “come in, this is me”, something has been exchanged. I’ve learned the shape of their humour, the rhythm of their thoughts, the things that make them light up and the things that make them retreat. Somewhere in all of that I’ve handed them something of myself too.

So when they leave, for whatever reason, they take that with them.

Perhaps that’s why endings can hurt so disproportionately to the amount of time someone occupied in our lives. We measure grief in time when perhaps we should measure it in depth, like a pebble dropped in water, sending ripples ever outwards.

If everyone I have befriended, trusted, laughed with, confided in, or simply recognised as one of mine has carried some small piece of me away with them, then perhaps I am carrying pieces of them as well.

Perhaps we are all mosaics of everyone who has ever mattered.

A mannerism borrowed here. A favourite song there. A strange expression we adopted without noticing. A confidence someone gave us when we had none of our own. A boundary learned painfully. A joke that still makes us smile.

So yes, friends come in seasons but none of them leave us exactly as they found us.

And perhaps that is the part worth remembering.

People leave.

The pieces don’t.