You get a text from your best friend on Tuesday. You read it. It makes you smile. You think, "I'll reply to this tonight when I have time to write a thoughtful response."
Two months later, you remember the text. The horror washes over you. You are convinced you are a terrible, selfish friend. The guilt of waiting two months makes replying now feel impossible, so you wait another month. The friendship quietly suffocates, not from a lack of love, but from a catastrophic failure of working memory.
The internet colloquially calls this "ADHD Object Permanence." In child psychology, object permanence is knowing a toy exists when it's under a blanket. For ADHD adults, it means that if a person, task, or object is not actively soliciting your attention in your immediate physical environment, your brain "archives" them to handle the overwhelming chaos of the present moment.
Your neurotypical friends do not understand this. They interpret your silence as a withdrawal of affection. They think, "If I mattered to them, they would remember to text me." But the ADHD brain does not sort memory by emotional importance; it sorts memory by dopamine, urgency, and visual proximity. This leads to a painful paradox: you can fiercely love someone from the bottom of your heart, yet functionally "forget" they exist for three straight weeks.
You cannot fix this with good intentions. Relying on an organic "I should call them" impulse is a recipe for isolation. You must accept that your social memory is mechanically broken and build an entirely artificial, automated system to sustain your relationships.