The Chinese love the idea of yuan fen. I have never quite heard of anything quite like it in Western speech, at least I’ve never managed to translate it. At best, I suppose it was opportunity, it was luck, it was destiny. Perhaps destiny was best, except how can destiny run out…it doesn’t make any sense, except of course that that is what happened.

Graduating high school, you really do not know who you will end up meeting again and who is shall we say, lost… From strangers to acquaintances to friends, perhaps to lovers even and then, strangers again. You looked then around you, at the other children, all dressed in the same white shirt and beige bottoms and think, your heart busting with love and affection, that you will see each of them again and reunite and have dinner dates and it will all be same. Or, like the little jaded cynic I am, know that perhaps a handful of you would remain friends, and the rest would be left to, well…yuan fen. What I didn’t expect of course was for that tiny handful to begin to leak out, for destiny to ooze through the pores of my fingers, for it to drip between my digits and scatter like the stars in the universe or the sand of a well-trodden beach.

So it was precisely that for some of my closest friends, the miles and hours became a wall, one that the great ladders of social media struggled to cross. This I admit was also a little foreseen. It was disappointing but to be frank, it was foreseen.

What I didn’t expect was for some, barely half an hour away, to simply melt out of my life. First it was missing dinner dates, then birthdays, then the text message at Chinese New Year and then…nothing. You were not strangers, strangers might meet and talk, you were the awkward two, I suppose the clichéd somebody that I used to know and that was simply life.

Life is yuan fen and destiny and whatever you want to call it. It is effort and missed effort and making the effort and then giving up and then letting it slowly fade and die and not fighting but letting it happen.

Should I have tried harder, sometimes I think yes. But as I grow older, and these old ghosts seem more and more distant, I think no. I think sometimes you simply have to let it go. A relationship is a handshake, a round of applause, it goes nowhere without two participants. You can try and fail, or you can reassure yourself that maybe, it wasn’t that they couldn’t be bothered, it wasn’t that you didn’t matter, it wasn’t that the past 7 years had been a lie, no, you had just run out of yuan fen. Frankly, my dear, you can tell yourself, it was simply never meant to be.