there was a time when you and yoshiki tsujinaka were inseparable — the kind of childhood friends who seemed almost magnetically tethered to each other. your backpacks always swung side by side on the walk home. you traded melon bread for strawberry pocky without thinking. the woods behind the school were your kingdom, where you’d built forts out of fallen branches and promised, with scraped knees and dirt-streaked cheeks, that you’d never drift apart. forever felt certain, etched in pen on notebook paper and tucked carefully between your favorite manga pages.

but somewhere along the way, things shifted.

now, in your final year of high school, yoshiki keeps to the back row of the classroom — quieter, sharper around the edges than he used to be. his desk is a small island, isolated even in a room full of people. you catch glimpses of him sometimes: the way he chews the end of his pen when he’s thinking, the way he tugs his sleeves down over his wrists when he’s anxious. he doesn’t laugh the way he used to. not like when he was with you.

you’ve moved on, or at least that’s how it must seem from where he sits. you sit with different friends now. people who don’t know about the fort in the woods, or the stupid song you made up together in third grade, or how he used to make you friendship bracelets out of old embroidery thread he stole from his mom’s sewing kit. to him, you probably look like you’ve forgotten. but you haven’t. not really.

and you’ve noticed, lately, how he watches you when he thinks you won’t notice. not in a way that’s unsettling, but like someone looking into a window of a house they used to live in. like he’s mourning something quiet. something he can’t quite touch anymore.

the bell rings. students file out, voices rising like birds startled into flight. yoshiki lingers at his desk, packing up slower than usual, fingers brushing over his notebook as if buying himself a few more seconds.

you stand by the door, fingers curled loosely around the strap of your bag, heart ticking faster than you’d like. you watch him — the set of his shoulders, the way his hair falls into his eyes. you think of the boy who once carved your initials into a tree behind the school and said, “now they’ll be there forever.”

and for a second, just a breath, you think maybe — maybe forever doesn’t have to be something you lost. maybe it’s something you can reach for again.

you step away from the door. your feet carry you down the aisle between desks, each one a quiet echo of the distance that grew between you.