Real friendships don’t need a zip code. They pick up mid-sentence after six months.

Some friendships hold their shape through long silences and pick up exactly where they stopped. That is not luck, it is what happens when the friendship was never running on proximity to begin with. Six months of nothing is not six months of decay, and reading a gap as evidence of a problem is how people talk themselves out of perfectly good friendships. You can just start the sentence again.

Message the one you have been putting off, with no apology for the silence in it. Skip the summary of the past year and go straight to something real. The good ones do not need a preamble.