Floater Friend

My definition of friendship has evolved a lot over time.

Growing up, I yearned for the ultimate best friend — or at least a tightly-knit group of friends. A loyal confidante. A partner in crime and everything in between.

The kind of person you would call when your car breaks down in the middle of the highway, or when you are too sick to drive yourself to the clinic.

Someone who arguably knows you better than your own family does, and whom you trust with the deepest, most unfiltered parts of yourself. Someone you can yap with for hours on end, yet also sit beside in complete silence without discomfort.

My ride-or-die.

Looking back, a few people came close to fitting that image. One in particular stood above the rest. But like many others before and after her, she too eventually drifted into the sea of outgrownness.

In my high school years, I encountered Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs through debate. I began to understand belonging as something to be actively built — a support system, a set of “my people”. I took that idea seriously and tried to construct it.

Yet every attempt at doing so seemed to arrive at the same ending.

For the longest time, I externalised the reason. I blamed them. Sometimes God. Sometimes the universe itself. Sometimes all three. I thought perhaps I was simply cursed with friendships that were destined to expire.

But over time, I realised the common denominator in all these failed friendships was none other than myself.

A wise person I once knew said that mismatched expectations are the cancer of any relationship, metastasising quietly over time until the very bond it came from eventually collapses under its weight.

I vehemently disagreed with that statement then. I understand it differently now.

You see, my understanding of friendship was always rooted in constancy and completeness. I longed for the forever friend, the one-and-only person entrusted with the keys to every door of my personality.

But eventually, I came to realise how futile that expectation truly was. After all, how could I expect someone to embody every quality I desired in a friend when I myself could not offer the same completeness in return?

Friendship, I learned, rarely exists in such absolute forms.

More often, it unfolds in ambiguous and fragmented ways: not a circle, but a constellation. Not a steady rhythm, but an occasional pulse.

This is where the idea of the floater friend began to make sense to me.

The person who knows many, is known by most, yet belongs nowhere entirely.

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For a long time, I thought being a floater friend was merely a transitional phase. A temporary state before eventually finding “my people” in the way films, books, and coming-of-age stories always promised us.

A coping mechanism, if you will.

But adulthood has a funny way of dismantling those grand narratives.

People move, priorities shift and commitments consume. Connection becomes less about depth alone, and more about alignment of timing, geography, and energy.

I used to internalise every drifting friendship as evidence of some personal deficiency. That I was too intense, too available, too much or somehow not enough in the ways that mattered.

But age slowly teaches you that people are not always leaving because you failed them. Sometimes they are simply becoming someone else — and so are you.

I think one of the bitter pills for me to swallow in life was that impermanence does not necessarily invalidate intimacy.

Some people are only meant to accompany specific versions of us. The friend who understood your teenage loneliness may not recognise your adult grief. The person who once knew everything about you may eventually only know an outdated version preserved in memory.

This is where the quiet paradox of the floater friend reveals itself:

You are rarely alone, yet seldom deeply known.

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Over the years, I have met countless wonderful people. Some made me laugh until my stomach hurt. Some stayed through difficult seasons. Some introduced me to new versions of who I could be.

Each person added their own colours onto the shifting blank canvas of my life. Their own crayons, brushes, textures, and strokes — and I cherish them all for that, even those whom I parted ways with.

But no matter how full my social calendar became and how lively my Instagram stories can be, a strange emptiness would often follow me home after every gathering.

An ache I could never properly articulate no matter how hard I tried.

I would leave dinners, hangouts, late-night drives, and group conversations feeling as though something fundamental was missing. As though I had spent hours being perceived, but not necessarily understood.

A sense of having been present, but not fully seen. As though I exist across many spaces, but never entirely within any of them.

Perhaps such is the nature of being a floater friend: existing across many surfaces without ever fully descending into depth. You become familiar with many people’s lives, yet rarely indispensable within any of them. Recognition without total understanding. Presence without permanence.

You float, left at the mercy of shifting tides of connection rather than being anchored anywhere.

You know everyone, but no one truly knows you in your entirety. They only know the version of you curated for the particular space you occupy in their lives. Fragments of you scattered across different settings.

And maybe that is why I often leave so many interactions feeling hollow, even when I genuinely enjoy the company of those around me. The deeper desire underneath it all was never simply to be surrounded by people, but to be fully witnessed by at least one.

I’ve begun to question whether that expectation itself is sustainable — or even fair to begin with. I struggle to embrace this painful truth that depth cannot always be demanded from friendship simply because we desire it intensely.

Some people are simply not built to love in that language. Some connections never evolve beyond proximity.

Maybe not every meaningful person in our lives was meant to become a permanent residence. Maybe some were only ever meant to be passing cities — places we briefly inhabited before continuing our journey elsewhere.