The strangest thing in a relationship is when you find that various aspects of a personality were figments of your own overactive imagination. Often, between the camaraderie and rapport of friendship, warm bubbles start to flutter around in our brains, clouding our better judgment. And then, with a jolt, we find that we overestimated. We found something that was never there.

I say it’s the strangest thing because it creates a weird sort of alienation and estrangement. Alienation because you wonder if they were at all the person you thought they were. And estrangement because you start to distance yourself, the bubbles recede, and you look at them through what you hope is a less colored vantage point. A long distance seems to extend between the two recently estranged friends, like two carriages driving in opposite directions with the passengers constantly facing each other and watching, watching, watching till the opposite car fades into oblivion. And when you lose sight of the car, you lose the motivation to chase it, asking yourself this: what good was all of that in the first place?

It’s not always caused by the foolishness of a fizzy, idyllic glee; frequently, the impetus is something more unavoidable like, say, that the person has layers and the bottom layer is starkly different from the top. And the layers only peel off after a period of time; the strata are not apparent at first glance.

Sometimes the relationship undergoes a botched and messy sort of surgery in which both sides try to act apply analgesics and smooth things over. A stitch and excuse here, and some there, and we can all pretend everything is just perfect. We’ll just conveniently overlook the unsightly blemishes the split caused. This spirals into the most desperate kind of friendship; faults are overlooked and the relationship continues at the hashed, lurching speed of a locomotive with a deranged driver.