There are moments when absence carries more weight than presence. When the space someone leaves behind doesn’t just signal distance, but a rupture. A confirmation of something you hadn’t yet said aloud. Not all harm is loud. Some betrayals unfold in silence. Sometimes, the deepest wounds are not from what was done, but from what was not.

I have always believed that friendship is a site of responsibility. To love someone is to be present. To recognize that relationships require more than shared joy. They require care, reciprocity, and repair. That belief has sustained me, but I have seen how quickly care turns conditional. How easily people disappear when accountability enters the room. Some people are only available for ease, not for the work that love demands.

This was not just one moment. It was not just one conversation. It was a pattern, a structure, a political reality that plays out in the intimate corners of our lives. I have seen how non-Black people, particularly those whose identities grant them proximity to whiteness, expect the safety of Black friendship without the responsibility of real care. They want the warmth. The way we hold space effortlessly. The way we know how to make people feel at home. But the moment we ask them to hold something heavy, they vanish.

I used to think these disappearances were about me. That if I had softened my words, made my pain easier to hold, things would have turned out differently. But I know better now. This is what proximity to whiteness teaches—to evade, to deflect, to disappear rather than engage. It is a refusal to be seen as someone who can harm. A retreat into silence, into absence, into the ease of never having to reckon with what it means to be in real relationship with Black people.

I named what had hurt me. I set a boundary. I said: this is where I end. Instead of sitting with discomfort, they called me rigid. Unforgiving. I have seen this before, and I refuse to let it shape what I build next. Black people are told we are too accommodating, too forgiving, too available. Yet, the moment we assert our limits, we become too harsh, too difficult, too unwilling to let things go. This contradiction is not accidental. It is structural. It is what happens when you are seen as something to be held for comfort, but never engaged with as an equal.

And so they disappeared. Not with an apology. Not with an attempt to repair. They vanished in the way that people do when their presence was never meant to be sustained. A blocking, a shutting down, a refusal to sit with what had been broken. A settler-colonial logic of disposability, played out in friendship.

I have seen it before. I have learned. People who cannot meet me in presence do not deserve my time. Moving forward, I am choosing relationships where care is not an afterthought, where presence is not conditional, and where accountability is not treated as a burden.

Care without accountability is not care at all. It is convenience. And I refuse to make myself convenient.