The campus feels like it's shedding its skin. Graduation posters appear overnight, taped to walls that once held open mic announcements and lost-cat flyers.
Smiling faces. Caps mid-air. Dates circled in hopeful red. They look too loud for a place already quieting down.
I walk past them with my backpack slung over one shoulder, lighter than it's ever been. Not because I've learned to let go, but because I've learned what I don't need to carry anymore.
Classrooms are mostly empty. I step into one on impulse, the door creaking. Rows of desks stare back like abandoned thoughts. The whiteboard still holds half-erased notes, someone's handwriting fading into dust. I sit in the seat I always chose, the one that felt safest. Funny how absence can be louder than a lecture.
Outside, students laugh too loud, posing in spaces they never noticed before. They talk about after-parties and train tickets, weaving phrases like we'll see, definitely, and of course we'll meet again. Everyone's pretending this isn't ending, or maybe pretending is the only way to survive it.
Lena's absence still follows me. I don't look for her face anymore. Love doesn't leave because you stop searching. It settles quietly, heavier, like a song you can't unhear. I'm not healed, but I'm not frozen either. I keep walking. Past the library, the notice board, the bench where Alice and I argued about nothing and everything. Past memories that don't ask permission to exist.
I don't have answers. I don't know if loving Lena forever is a flaw or a fact. I don't know if leaving means abandoning something or finally choosing myself. But my feet keep moving. And maybe that's enough.
The sky looks undecided. Neither night nor evening, just soft bruised blue. The graduation hall glows in the distance, impatient for the ceremony to happen and be done.
Alice walks beside me, hands tucked in her jacket pockets. She doesn't speak at first, but I can feel her noticing.
"You're quiet," she says finally. "Not in your usual brooding-artist way. This is… different."
I huff a small laugh. "You have categories for my silence now?"
"Of course. I'm a professional Ash-watcher." She bumps my shoulder lightly. "So, what's going on in that tragic brain of yours?"
We stop near the steps. Students rush past, laughing, shouting, living lives that start tomorrow. We stand in a pocket of stillness.
"I think," I say slowly, "I'm changing."
Alice raises an eyebrow. "God help us all."
"I mean it. I don't feel… stuck anymore."
That gets her attention. She turns fully, reading my face like a familiar page with new sentences.
She tilts her head. "A positive change… Well, that's new."
I nod. "I'm focusing on my own life now."
She waits, as always, letting silence do its thing.
"I'm letting Lena go," I continue. "Not erasing her. Not pretending she didn't matter. Just… not holding onto the version of us that can't exist anymore."
Her expression softens. She doesn't interrupt.
"I still love her," I say quietly. "I think I always will. That doesn't disappear just because time passes. And I don't want to replace her. I don't want to look for someone to fill that space."
She exhales. "Yeah. I figured."
"You did?"
"Ash," she says gently, "you've never been the type to use people as bandages."
We stand in the cool evening air, the quiet stretching between us.
"I need to be honest with you," I say, voice steady. "You're my safest place. You always have been. The person I trust when everything feels like it's falling apart."
She nods, eyes steady.
"But I don't see you as… that," I finish.
"Not a potential lover. Not someone I'm moving toward romantically."
Alice blinks, then snorts. "Wow. Rejected with poetry. Brutal."
I laugh despite myself. Relief loosens something in me.
"Sorry," I say.
She waves it off. "No. Don't be. I'd rather hear the truth than some half-baked emotional confusion speech."
She studies me for a long moment before adding, "For what it's worth, I appreciate the honesty. And the respect."
"I didn't want to hurt you."
"You didn't," she says simply. "You trusted me enough not to lie. That counts."
We sit down on the stone steps. Cold, grounding, real.
"You know," she says, staring ahead, "there was a version of me that wondered if maybe one day you'd wake up and see me differently. I've had heartbreaks before. Boys are mostly jerks."
She lets out a small breath, almost a laugh.
"But you were different."
She looks at me then, her gaze softening.
"You actually value the people who love you. You're gentle. You give too much of yourself. And yeah, that's probably why life keeps hurting you."
She pauses.
"The way you loved Lena… I think part of me wished someone could love me like that."
She looks away again.
"But I also knew it wouldn't be fair. To you. Or to Lena's memory."
I glance at her. "You're really okay?"
She smiles, small but genuine. "Yeah. I am. I don't want to be someone's almost. Or someone's substitute."
I swallow. "You deserve more than that."
"I know," she says. "And so do you."
We watch a group of students sprint past, laughing, shouting about borrowed robes and missed deadlines.
"I'm glad we had this conversation," Alice says. "It feels like… adulthood."
I groan. "Don't say it like that."
"Too late," she laughs.
The bond between us feels different now. Not lighter, not heavier. Just clearer. Stronger in a way that doesn't demand more than it can hold.
When we stand, she bumps my shoulder. "Come on, poet. Let's survive graduation."
I follow, heart steady, grateful for a friendship that didn't need romance to matter.
Looking back now, I know this much is true:
If Alice hadn't existed, I don't think I would have survived myself. She was the one constant. The quiet anchor. The saving grace I didn't know I was clinging to at the time.
And yet, memory is cruel when you write it from the future.
Because sometimes, when I revisit this version of myself, steady and moving and almost hopeful, a thought still creeps in uninvited.
Would it have been better if I had died anyway?
Before Lena…
I don't linger on it. I don't let it win.
But I won't lie and pretend it was never there.
This is the part of the story where I was still walking forward.
Still believing motion was enough.
I didn't know yet how expensive survival would become.