Some absences don't fade with time 🕯️. They just learn how to exist quietly in the spaces between people-settling into hallways, half-finished conversations, and the pauses no one knows how to fill. In a school where nothing ever really changes, one boy remains exactly where he was left, like a page stuck in the same sentence 📖. While the other becomes a name no one quite knows how to say anymore-only remembered in fragments, like something heard in a dream that won't stay after waking. And when something lost suddenly finds its way back, it doesn't return the same way it left... if it returns at all ❤️‍🩹. Because some things don't come back as they were-they come back altered, distant, almost unfamiliar... like they've crossed somewhere you can't follow.