you carved your name into my living thread,

then tore the seam to watch the fiber bleed—

leaving my raw, unraveled heart to rot,

while you walked away, untouched by what you did.

i choke on frayed remains across the floor,

strangled by knots you casually erased—

cursing this open wound that still waits

for a ghost who easily replaced me.

A school should be filled with laughter, unfinished assignments, friendships, dreams, and the innocent noise of young people growing into who they are meant to be. Yet on this day, two young lives were taken, while others were left wounded—physically, emotionally, and perhaps in ways we may never fully see.

And all I can think is:

They were supposed to grow old.

They were supposed to graduate. To celebrate achievements. To make mistakes, fall in love with life, chase dreams, build families, and one day look back at their younger selves and smile.

Instead, their families are left with photographs, memories, and an unbearable question:

“What would they have become?”

That is the cruelest part of losing someone so young. We do not only mourn who they were. We mourn the future they never got to live.

A chair may remain empty in a classroom. A uniform may never be worn again. A name may still be remembered during attendance, even when the person who answered it is no longer there.

They were not numbers.

They were someone’s child. Someone’s friend. Someone’s favorite person.

They had dreams that had barely begun to unfold.

And now, all we can do is remember.

May we remember them not only because of how their lives ended, but because they lived, they mattered, and they were loved.

May their families find comfort in every beautiful memory they left behind.

And may we never become so accustomed to tragedy that we forget how precious a young life truly is.

They were supposed to grow old.

They deserved more mornings.
More laughter.
More tomorrows.
They deserved a future.

Requiescant in pace.
May they rest in peace.

We never expect to lose a friend because of betrayal.

We trust them with the things we cannot tell everyone. We share our laughter, our secrets, our dreams, our worst days, and even the versions of ourselves that we are afraid other people might judge. We let them see us completely because we believe they would never use what they know against us.

And then, somehow, they do.

What hurts most about betrayal is the realization that the person who hurt us was once the person we trusted not to.

We start questioning everything.

Were the memories real?

Did the friendship ever mean as much to them as it did to us?

Was there something we could have done differently?

We replay old conversations. We remember the promises. We look at old pictures and wonder how something that once felt so genuine could end with us becoming strangers.

And the cruelest part?

We still miss them.

We can be angry and still miss them. We can know that they hurt us and still remember the times they made us laugh. We can understand that walking away is the right thing to do and still wish, deep down, that things had turned out differently.

Because when we lose a friend through betrayal, we don’t only lose a person.

We lose the future we imagined with them.

The inside jokes that will never have new versions. The conversations that will never happen again. The plans that will remain unfinished. The simple moments we once thought would become memories we would laugh about together years from now.

Instead, they become memories we learn to carry alone.

For a while, we may blame ourselves.

We wonder if we were too trusting. Too forgiving. We wonder if we missed the signs or ignored the things that should have warned us. We convince ourselves that maybe, if we had been better friends, they would have treated us differently.

But betrayal is a choice.

Someone else’s decision to hurt us does not determine our worth.

Eventually, we learn that forgiveness means accepting that what happened cannot be changed and choosing not to let it destroy who we become.

We don’t have to hate them.

We don’t have to erase the memories.

We don’t even have to pretend that we never cared.

We can simply let go.

Because some people are meant to be chapters in our lives, not the entire story.

Maybe that friendship was meant to teach us that trust is precious. That loyalty cannot be forced. That sometimes, the people we would never hurt are the people who hurt us the most. And that walking away from someone we love does not always mean we stopped caring.

Sometimes, it means we finally started caring about ourselves.

So we say goodbye—not to the memories, but to the version of us that kept hoping things would return to the way they were.

We can remember them without returning to them.

We can appreciate what the friendship once was without ignoring what it eventually became.

And perhaps one day, we will look back without asking, “Why did they betray us?”

We will simply say:

“It hurt. It mattered. It ended. And we survived it.”

Because sometimes, the hardest goodbye is not saying goodbye to a person.

It is saying goodbye to the version of the friendship we wished could have lasted forever.

Amor fati.

Love what fate has given us—even the endings we never wanted.

And perhaps that is how we move forward: not by forgetting what we lost, but by accepting that some endings are not meant to break us. Some are simply meant to teach us when it is time to let go.

We lost a friendship, but we did not lose ourselves.