At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I ran into a school friend I hadn’t seen in years. It was completely unexpected. She had travelled all the way from Hong Kong to perform in one of the shows.

I first spotted her on stage at the Asian Arts Awards launch. The room buzzed with quiet conversations, lights flickering around us. I remember thinking, Wait… is that her? It had been so many years, but I recognised the way she moved, the expression on her face. For a moment, I was back in our school days.

We used to be inseparable. Teachers would see us in the corridors and say, “Oh, those two who do drama.” We spent so much time performing together and eventually won a championship at the Hong Kong Speech Festival.

I can still remember the bright stage lights and the way we would meet each other’s eyes between lines. That small look gave me the confidence to keep going. It was a silent message: You’ve got this. We were completely in sync, carrying each other through the performance.

The stage was our shared world. But life has a way of moving people apart.

There was no argument, no dramatic ending. Just different universities, new lives and new circles of friends. Then one day, you realise you can’t remember the last time you really spoke.

And there’s nothing to repair when nothing is broken. Some friendships don’t end. They simply become part of your history.

Then there are the relationships we want to return to but can’t, because the person is no longer here.

When my grandmother passed away, I realised I had never been curious enough to ask about her life. There were so many questions I hadn’t asked, so many things I hadn’t said. I was young, and I thought we had time.

The words you wish you had said have nowhere to land.

Sometimes those regrets return late at night, and you find yourself crying over a conversation you can no longer have. That kind of regret settles somewhere deep, somewhere time doesn’t seem to reach.

But it also pushes me to write. Writing gives me somewhere to put the words I can no longer say in person, somewhere to work through the guilt and feelings tied to people I can no longer reach.

A friend once told me that, two years after breaking up with his girlfriend, he still saw her in his dreams. Sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night, crying, his heart pounding.

I asked, “Why not try therapy?”

He shook his head. “It won’t help… and I don’t want to be cured.”

I wondered whether letting go of the pain felt, to him, like letting go of her. Perhaps the hurt had become one of the ways he still felt connected to someone he loved.

My instinct is different. I want to fix things. I want to put right the mistakes I have made. But sometimes the other person doesn’t want to listen. An apology stays unspoken, or it is heard but not accepted.

That is when you learn that not everything can be repaired. Not every relationship finds its way back.

Maybe we don’t have to force every unfinished story towards an ending. The mistakes, the scars and the things we never managed to say are part of our lives too. They remind us that we have loved, that we have lost, and that we have kept going.

What remains is the confidence a friend once gave me on stage, the questions I wish I had asked my grandmother, and the words I am still finding the courage to write.

Love, loss, and the quiet strength I carry forward, day by day.