The guidance office was beige, always beige. Beige chairs with that stiff fabric that left a print on your skin if you sat too long, beige carpet pressed flat by years of feet. The only splash of colour was a poster with a sunrise over water and the words You Are Not Alone in a font too cheerful for the room.

I was sixteen when they called me down. Someone had said something. Someone had spoken.

The counselor was kind in the way adults are when they have a script: voice pitched low, words paced evenly, pauses left open like blank spaces on a form. Are you safe? Do you think about hurting yourself? I tried to answer without answering. The truth hung heavy, like a coin in my mouth I didn’t want to spit out. Eventually, the weight gave me away.

Mandatory sessions. That was the phrase. My schedule rearranged, ink over pencil, new appointments folded into the week. I sat in a smaller office with another adult, one who wore glasses with frames the colour of smoke and asked me to describe my feelings as if they were objects I could set on the table: a stone, a rope, a locked box. I hated every minute.

And I hated her, my friend who had spoken.

It didn’t take much to figure out who it was. She avoided my eyes in the cafeteria. When our group sat at lunch, we were suddenly divided: her at one end, me at the other. The rest of our friends didn’t comment, just adjusted their trays like this was the new normal. It was clean, almost surgical, the way silence carved through us.

We stopped talking. That should have been the end of it.

At the time I called it betrayal. I told myself friendship meant loyalty, and loyalty meant silence. But the years since have taught me to rename things. Betrayal became interference. Silence became love spoken sideways.

Because the truth is simple, graceless: I am alive.

That’s the sentence I circle back to. Ungainly, unpoetic, but heavier than any metaphor. I am alive because she chose to risk me hating her more than she feared losing me. She traded our friendship for my continuance.

Back then I couldn’t see it. Now, in the quiet of adulthood, I rehearse gratitude to an empty room, knowing the words won’t reach her.

Years later it happened in reverse. A friend of mine, older now, in the long dusk of our twenties. He joked less, slept at odd hours, texted things that weren’t jokes at three in the morning. Once he said, “I’m tired of holding the roof up,” then claimed later it was nothing, just a phrase he’d read. But I could see the structure sagging around him.

So I did what had been done to me. I told his sister. I picked up the phone, made the words plain, and handed him over.

He stopped speaking to me.

Weeks went by without a reply. Months. When I saw him in town, he crossed the street. The distance between us filled with the kind of silence that feels deliberate. Then, a year or two later, I heard he was better. Therapy, medication, steady work. I didn’t hear it from him, but from someone else, the way news of the living often travels: sideways, unasked for.

And then came the wedding.

I wasn’t invited. But one night, scrolling without purpose, I saw the photos. Him in a dark suit, his smile wider than I remembered, his bride radiant. Their arms looped, their friends gathered around. A whole life arranged like a tableau, without me.

I looked at those photos too long, staring at pixels as if they might blink. Told myself it was worth it. That absence at his wedding was a fair price for his being alive to have one.

But sometimes, late at night, I wonder if he thinks of me. If, like me, he’s learned to rename betrayal. If gratitude has found him, slow as a landslide.

Life mostly feels ordinary. Work, streaming shows, dishes in the sink. But small details open seams. The dry squeak of a marker on a whiteboard and suddenly I’m back in that beige office, hearing the counselor’s script. A cafeteria’s echo and I remember the neat division of our table. A photo of someone else’s wedding and I’m again staring at what I lost so someone else could keep living.

That’s how the uncanny slips in: not with spectacle, but with memory ambushing you in the middle of errands. Everything normal until it isn’t.

I wonder sometimes what would happen if I saw her, the friend who told on me, who cut our friendship clean. Would I thank her? Could I? Or would I freeze, sixteen again, the words caught like coins in my mouth?

One night I dreamed of her. The dream wasn’t strange at first. We were in the school cafeteria, trays between us, the smell of pizza and bleach. She sat across from me, the way she used to, her hair pulled back, her hands folded.

Then she spoke, though her lips didn’t move. I thought you’d be angry.

“I was,” I said, and my voice sounded older than the room.

I had to decide, she said, still not moving her mouth. A friend who forgives me, or a friend who lives.

“I didn’t know that was the choice,” I said.

We never do.

Then the bell rang, the same metallic clang that used to startle me into spilling milk, and I woke up.

I lay there a long time, the dream echoing like a hallway after the last footsteps fade.

Sometimes I think about writing to her. Not an email, too sharp. A letter, on paper that folds and crinkles, something she could hold. I imagine myself writing: I am alive. You traded our friendship for my life, and I understand now. Thank you.

But I never send it. Maybe because I don’t know where she is. Maybe because gratitude feels too heavy to mail. Maybe because some debts are meant to live only in thought.

Still, when the smell of dry-erase ink catches me off guard, I think of her. And when I see my friend’s wedding photos, I think of him. Both gone from my life, but alive. Both beyond my reach, but still tethered to me by invisible threads.

The uncanny part is this: sometimes, in the most ordinary places, I feel like they’re thinking of me, too.

In the middle of the grocery aisle, reaching for bread, I’ll get the sudden, irrational certainty that my name has just crossed their mind. Walking past a bus stop, I’ll feel that someone is remembering me at that exact second. It’s nothing you can prove. Just a shiver, a tilt in the air.

Maybe that’s all gratitude is, in the end: a ghost we carry for each other. It shows up in the cracks of our ordinary days, reminding us that even silence can be a kind of thank you.

And maybe that’s enough.

Because I am alive.

And so are they.