The hallway is loud—too loud. Lockers slam. People shout across crowds. Someone’s music leaks through their earbuds. But all of it blurs when you see him.

He’s across the hall, laughing at something she just said. Her hand’s wrapped around his arm like she belongs there. She doesn’t. She doesn't know the way his mouth curls when he’s holding back a real laugh. She doesn't know that his favorite song changes every week, but he’ll still always go back to that one track he swore he hated.

But you do. You keep walking, even though your chest tightens like you’re being pulled through water. You keep your head high, like you’re not watching him out of the corner of your eye. Like you’re not hoping—desperately, hopelessly—that maybe he’ll look back.

He doesn’t—he’s gotten good at pretending. And maybe you have too. You still remember the night it all cracked apart. Sitting in your room, his name in your notifications, but everything between you suddenly felt foreign. That aching silence between words. That feeling like he’d already started letting go before either of you said it out loud.

“Maybe we should go back to being friends,” he said, voice flat. Like it hadn’t meant everything to him. And you nodded. Because you didn’t know what else to do. Because loving him felt like holding on to something already falling.

But you didn’t stop. You still look for him in the cafeteria. Still listen for his voice in the halls. Still hold your breath every time someone says his name like it doesn’t belong to you anymore. You tried to move on too—but no one sounds like him. No one laughs like him. And when you sit across from someone else, it always feels like you’re trying too hard to be someone who forgot.

He has a new girlfriend now. She wears his hoodie. She walks with him between classes like it's always been her place. But today, when your eyes meet his—just for a moment—it breaks you a little. Because in that second, it’s not just him looking at you. It’s everything you were looking back. And in his eyes, for that single flicker of silence in a noisy hallway, you know he remembers too.

Remembers how you’d wait for him by the stairwell. Remembers how you used to play with his fingers when you held hands. Remembers that none of this—her—was ever supposed to be real.

She’s a distraction. A stand-in. Someone to help him forget you.

But it’s not working.

Because when he looks at you like that—like the world stopped moving—you know the truth: he didn’t get over it. He just buried it. You’re both pretending. Both smiling for other people. Both aching in ways no one else can see. But you're not friends, not really.

You're just two people passing in a hallway, pretending you don’t still orbit the same heartbreak.

“Back to friends”, he said.

But what you had wasn’t built to shrink that small. And every time you see him with her, laughing too loud, smiling just a second too late—you know…

He misses you.