Someone got you into music. Years ago, when you didn't know anything, they lent you records and sat with you while you worked out why they mattered. They gave you a vocabulary you now think in without noticing.

And then, much later, it fell apart. Over something else entirely — money, or a slight, or just the slow accumulation of things unsaid. You don't speak now. When their name comes up you change the subject.

Here's what I don't get. People in that situation will often go bitter about the whole of it. Not just the ending — the whole thing, retroactively, all the way back to the beginning. As though the falling out reached backwards and spoiled the years before it.

But you can't do the edit. That's the thing. You're still listening to music the way they taught you to listen. Every time you hear something and know what you're hearing, that's them. It's in you now, load-bearing, and there's no version of you that has that and doesn't have them.

And it goes further than the obvious inheritance. The person you became in that friendship — a bit more open, or a bit more careful, or whoever you were in those particular years — that person is who made every decision since. Take the relationship out and you don't get a cleaner life. You get a different one, with different people in it, and you don't get to keep yourself.

Nobody gets to curate this. You can't accept the parts that turned out well and return the rest, because it wasn't sold to you separately. It came as one thing.

So I can be genuinely hurt by how something ended and still be thankful it happened. Those aren't in conflict. The hurt is about the ending. The gratitude is about everything before it, which is still true, and stays true regardless of what came after.

I'm not saying you have to reconcile, or forgive, or pick up the phone. Some things should stay ended. I'm only saying the good years happened, and being sour about them costs you something and costs them nothing.

Every time I hear somebody speak with real bitterness about a person who once mattered enormously to them, I don't get it.