The Summer We Stopped Pretending

We were seventeen and thought the world revolved around our group chat.

That summer, one of us moved away, one fell in love, and one stopped answering messages.

For a while, I tried to hold us together with memes and late-night texts, but eventually, I stopped too.

Years later, I ran into one of them at a coffee shop.

We didn’t talk about why we drifted. We just smiled — like nothing had happened, and everything had.

Maybe friendship doesn’t end. Maybe it just changes shape until you recognize it again.