Dusk spilled across the window frame. The evening wind carried fragments of moonlight into the room, scattering them across the cold white tiles like a strand of pearls come undone.
I was curled into the corner of the window seat, scrolling mechanically through my phone. Blue light washed over other people’s happiness and heartbreak on my feed.
Then a shared livestream cut through the haze.
The host’s signature laugh leapt through the dark while comments flickered past like a swarm of fireflies. My hand tightened around the edge of my phone. My nails nearly bit into the tempered glass.
Beneath that familiar profile picture was the number of the same livestream room.
For one strange second, the coordinates of Beijing and Chengdu seemed to cross like star trails, striking a faint spark inside the small rectangle of my screen.
A raindrop slipped through the crack in the window and left a dark mark on the sill.
I stared at the screen and suddenly remembered the crooked handwriting she had left in my elementary-school yearbook.
“You’ll always be my priority.”
The girl with the high ponytail in my memory seemed to be waving at me again. She had once caught me through every fall.
And on that unexpected rainy night, remembering it made my eyes burn.
The Answer the Star Student Got Wrong
In fifth grade, she always sat in the front row, her ponytail tied with a pale blue ribbon into a perfectly even bow, the collar of her white shirt crisp as folded paper.
While the other girls chased one another around the classroom, she sat quietly at her desk reading. Her wrist bone tapped lightly against the tabletop with the rhythm of a second hand, and even the small current of air stirred by each turned page seemed careful not to disturb the drooping pothos on the windowsill.
That day, our class was choosing its outstanding student. She sat in the front row as neatly as ever, almost like a porcelain doll.
But one raised hand after another passed her by.
Sunlight fell across her stiffened back. Slowly, she lowered her head, her lashes casting small shadows over her face.
Just when everyone seemed to think the answer had already been decided, I raised my hand.
She turned around at once. Her crescent-shaped eyes brimmed with starlight, and a mischievous curve appeared at the corner of her mouth. Beneath the desk, she secretly flashed me a victory sign.
Even the freckles hidden beneath all that perfect composure seemed to come alive, dancing on either side of her nose when she smiled.
Back then, we were like two Pop Rocks stuck in each other’s teeth—one careless movement away from bursting into crackling laughter.
Seventeen Minutes Until the Light Came On
At three in the morning, the city looked like a crumpled letter, with only the streetlights flickering along its creases.
“I’m sorry. Being alive is so exhausting.”
The sentence moved softly across the screen into her chat box, like a fleck of starlight dropped by accident into the dark.
A few seconds later, my phone began vibrating continuously in my palm. Her messages hit like hard rain.
“Don’t do anything stupid!!!!!!!”
“Wait for me.”
Three times.
Voice messages kept arriving in between.
I turned my phone face down, as though burying a heart that no longer wanted to beat.
Seventeen minutes later, a light suddenly came on downstairs, like a tear opening in the dark.
The next time my screen lit up, it was a selfie from the elevator. Her puffer jacket was zipped only to her chest, cartoon-print pajamas showing underneath. Tears from the cold wind were still caught in her lashes.
The elevator numbers kept climbing, like drumbeats quickening with my heartbeat.
The moment the door opened, she threw herself at me hard enough to knock me half a step backward.
Her panicked breath turned to mist in the stairwell, but the arms around me were burning hot. The sound-activated lights flickered on and off above us, scattering broken shadows across the white walls.
Her breathing tangled with her sobs.
“You said you’d be my bridesmaid...”
“We’ll always be best friends.”
Her voice was quiet, but it gave me the courage to believe in the world again.
I don’t know how many times the lights came on and went dark after that. By then, she had curled into a small ball beside me, her puffer jacket smeared with dust from the wall.
I watched her lashes tremble. The traces of how desperately she had rushed to me had not yet faded.
Morning light spilled gently across the window frame and laid a soft glow over her exhausted outline, as though trying to keep that sleepless night from disappearing.
Seven Centimeters Between Our Lives
One afternoon in our final year of high school, sunlight ran down the glass windows of the milk tea shop while she scooped tapioca pearls into my cup one by one, as she always did.
I watched droplets slide down the side of the cup like some silent countdown.
When she told me she wanted me to meet the person she liked, excitement kept breaking through her voice.
I nodded mechanically, my thumbnail pressing crescent-shaped white marks into the cup.
On the sleeve, the words “You’ll always be my priority” were beginning to blur beneath the condensation, dissolving into pale clouds I could no longer read clearly.
I could no longer tell what I was feeling.
She seemed to still be telling me something happy, but I lowered my head and let my thoughts scatter.
The sound of running on the track, the murmur of reading in classrooms, the workbook lying open on her desk—all of it belonged to a daily life I could no longer reach.
My own world had narrowed to the smell of hospital disinfectant and the thoughts that refused to end after midnight.
The straw punctured the milk foam. White froth rose and swallowed the dark-brown trails of sugar underneath.
I realized then that what separated us was more than the seven centimeters of the cup rim.
There was the midsummer flowing from the tip of her pen, and the endless night sealed inside my pillbox.
Love Marked Unread
Unread messages gathered dust at the bottom of the list, like a lemon forgotten at the back of the fridge, slowly growing patches of mold.
Her chat box no longer stayed pinned to the top.
The little reminders—“Remember to eat breakfast”—I repainted into unread red dots with the neon of late nights.
We turned at our separate crossroads.
The ink bleeding across the cuff of her school uniform was an unfinished math problem. When I looked up, all I saw was the pallid strip of light on the hospital ceiling.
Her friends talked about university and the future. My world held only one cry for help after another.
I began to envy the starry sky hidden inside her textbooks, the roar of everyone cheering when evening study hall suddenly lost power, and the new friends I had started treating as betrayals.
I tested her limits with one unreasonable demand after another, like a spoiled child—craving love while also tasting the strange rush of destroying the very love I wanted.
In the end, “Want to meet this weekend?” faded inside the chat box until it became a specimen, like a ginkgo leaf pressed between the pages of an old textbook, too brittle to touch.
We were like two shadows stretched long across the back wall of a classroom at dusk, overlapping for a moment before quietly slipping past each other.
No warning.
No goodbye.
Memory Kept Revising the Ending
Moonlight swam into the room like silver fish while the number of that same livestream room on my feed kept blinking.
The promises we had once written on homework paper were fading. Tears had soaked the corners, yet the creases still held the most beautiful marks.
Our story had stopped in a chapter whose wings suddenly gave out, like a poem broken off before its final lines.
Through the faint light of the screen, I could still see the sunsets you shared, as bright as ever.
And from the silence of my own deep water, I counted the small glints of light leaking in from your world.
One sleepless morning, I opened your profile picture, then closed it again.
The words still would not send.
I still want to tell you:
You are the best friend I have ever had.
🌙 Can you grieve a friendship?
Yes.
Friendship grief does not require a death. Losing someone’s place in your life—even when they are still alive—can still be a real form of grief.
There is no ritual for this. The love stays where it was—intact, and with nowhere to go.
Have you ever grieved a friendship that never really had a goodbye?
You can leave it here quietly.
I read every comment.
Oh Xiaobian… seventeen minutes. She came running in cartoon pajamas because you needed her, and that says everything about the love between you. I’m so sorry life carried you into two different worlds before either of you was ready. And yes, we can grieve a friendship… sometimes for years, because the love never received a proper goodbye. 🫶🥹
Ohmygod, it's sad to digest. Choosing different routes, where it wasn't even your choice is so hard to feel, pure friendships don't deserve this, but I would say it's alright, having no hate and moving on is cool for now, sending love <333