We Made Plans

We had it all mapped out. Beach mornings, iced coffee afternoons, and stargazing nights on your rooftop. A final summer before college. Before the world would ask us to grow up. You said we'd chase the sun across every weekend, like nothing could ever change. I believed you.

June began with lists—what we’d wear, where we’d go, playlists for the road trips we hadn’t taken yet. Our group chat was electric with countdowns and laughing emojis. You even bought that orange bikini, the one you'd been eyeing since February.

But the first sign that things wouldn’t go as planned came quiet, like a cough in a movie theater. Your dad fell sick.

At first, it was “just a flu.” Then the test results came, then the hospital visits. Your messages slowed. "Sorry, just a rough day." Then nothing for three days straight.

We didn’t talk about the way summer was already shifting beneath us. We pretended it was temporary—just a delay. You’d be back soon. We'd still go to the lake. We'd still have that night picnic with the cheap fairy lights and sour candy.

I filled time with the others, but everything felt… muted. Like eating ice cream with a sore throat. We went to the beach once, and I took a photo in your spot, thinking maybe you’d like to see it. I never sent it.

By July, you had practically vanished from the group chat. You answered my texts with one-liners. "Hope you're okay," I wrote once. You replied, "Yeah, just tired."

But tired doesn’t explain silence. Tired doesn’t explain how summer went from sunshine to fog in three weeks flat. I wanted to call, but what would I say? That I missed you? That I hated watching the others move on while I kept glancing at your empty seat? That the songs on our playlist made me nauseous now?

I didn't call. Instead, I tried pretending too. I laughed at jokes that didn’t feel funny and went to barbecues I didn’t want to attend. I let people think I was having the time of my life.

But every sunset reminded me of that promise we made on your rooftop. The one where you said, "Let’s make this summer unforgettable." I guess we did. Just not in the way we meant.

Mid-August, you finally replied to one of my voice notes. Your voice was soft, like you were speaking through sleep. “My dad’s gone.” That was it. Three words. Heavy. Sharp. Final. I wanted to write back something comforting, something solid. But everything I typed felt like fluff. Instead, I just wrote:

“I’m here.” You didn’t reply. But three days later, you showed up outside my house. Hair unbrushed. Hoodie too big. Your eyes looked older than mine, like you'd lived a whole year while the rest of us were tanning.

You didn’t speak, just sat on my porch steps. I sat next to you. We watched the streetlights come on. And for the first time that summer, I didn’t feel like I was pretending. You finally whispered, “It all feels so far away now. Like the plans, the laughs… They happened to someone else.”

I nodded. “They kind of did.”We didn’t talk about what we lost. We didn’t mention the bikini, the beach, the rooftop. We just sat, quietly acknowledging a truth we couldn’t say out loud:

Summer had its own plans.Not the kind made in group chats or Pinterest boards. The kind that arrives without warning and steals the shape of what you thought your life would be.

We had imagined a season of freedom. Instead, we were given grief, distance, and a silence that stretched across days. And yet… in that still moment, shoulder to shoulder on my porch, I realized something else.

Some summers don’t shimmer. Some come to break you, to show you who you are when the light goes out. They don’t give you tan lines and stories for Instagram—they give you scars and strength. That summer didn’t give me what I expected. It gave me what I needed.

It gave me silence. Real silence. The kind where healing begins. It gave me a friend who came back, not as the girl I knew, but as someone braver, more real. And it gave me the understanding that plans are just paper birds—pretty, hopeful, but not made to survive storms.

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Thank you for reading,

With love and hope,

Muhammad Rahim