There was something quietly magical about the friendships we made in school, as if they had stitched themselves into us before we even understood what friendship truly meant. We never tried too hard, never measured effort, we simply sat beside someone one day and somehow they became part of our everyday world. We laughed at the silliest things, shared lunch boxes without asking, fought over nothing and forgot about it by the next morning. The walks back home were filled with conversations that were never important, yet they meant everything. Those moments never asked to be remembered, yet they stayed. Years passed, faces changed, life grew louder and more complicated, but those memories remained soft and untouched, like pages of a book me had read long ago but never really closed. Sometimes they returned without warning in a familiar smell, an old song, or a random date that once meant celebration, and for a brief moment we were no longer who we had become, but who we had been then lighter, simpler, unguarded. Perhaps that is why those school bonds never truly faded, because they had never been built with intention or expectation, they were purely formed in innocence, carried by routine, and left behind as a quiet part of us that time could never really take away.