[Diary Entry]
Dear Diary,
Today, I learned something important.
Not every person who holds your hand will hold your heart.
Some just hold your secrets — until it's time to break you with them.
⸻
Rhea had always been the loud one between them.
Where Aarohi whispered, Rhea shouted. Where Aarohi shrank, Rhea spread herself like fire — laughing, teasing, loud in every classroom corner.
To everyone else, they were the perfect pair — opposites that balanced each other.
To Aarohi, Rhea was safety. Or at least, she used to be.
⸻
They met in 6th grade — a spilled water bottle, a shared chocolate, a laugh over silly class notes. And just like that, Aarohi had her first best friend.
By the time they reached 9th, Aarohi had told Rhea everything: about her parents' constant fighting, her sketchbook hidden beneath the mattress, the diary she wrote in every night like a prayer.
Rhea was the first person she ever showed her designs to. And she remembered how Rhea once said:
"You'll be the next Manish Malhotra, watch. Just don't forget me when you're famous!"
Aarohi had smiled for real that day. A rare, wide smile.
⸻
But people change. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes cruelly.
It started when Rhea began hanging out with another group of girls — louder, meaner, the type that laughed too hard at other people's pain.
She still smiled at Aarohi. Still waved across corridors.
But the warmth was missing — like holding a cup of tea that had already gone cold.
⸻
The real betrayal came one rainy Tuesday.
Aarohi had returned from the restroom during lunch and found a group of girls huddled around Rhea's phone, laughing.
Her heart sank before her mind even understood why.
And then she heard her own words being read aloud —
"Sometimes I feel like I wasn't meant to exist. Just… float. Invisible. Unwanted."
Laughter.
Louder this time.
Rhea was laughing too.
Aarohi froze. Her throat tightened as if her body was choking on silence.
That was from her diary. A private entry. The one she had once read aloud to Rhea when she was shaking with anxiety after her father had thrown her sketches into the trash.
And now, it was being treated like a joke.
Aarohi turned and walked out.
She didn't cry. Not then.
She just walked through the school corridor as if she didn't exist.
⸻
That night, she didn't write in her diary.
She didn't draw.
She didn't speak during dinner when her mother complained about the rice being overcooked or her father grunted over the TV.
But before bed, she pulled out a page from the back of her diary — clean, untouched.
And she wrote with a hand that trembled, but didn't stop.
"She knew every wound. And still, she cut the deepest."
"I lost a friend today. But maybe… she was never mine to begin with."
She folded that paper and kept it under her pillow.
Some scars didn't bleed.
But they ached louder than anything else.