It ranks as one of the worst kinds of feeling, just below regret and guilt.

Tonight I felt, for the first time I’d not denied, for real, the insidious realisation of a friend[ship] lost. Its history has been eventful, and such events took it in a starkly different direction to that which speculative hindsight would suggest it should go. How I wish that we’d – no, I’d – made better choices, waited for the passing of time to make all the minutiae clear. What a different world and worldview my friend and I would share.

So I rue the likeliness of our friendship’s future impossibility. I just miss my friend as she once was, and the friend she could have become.