Maybe Neither of Them Was Wrong.

n. inspired by Satoru and Suguru

People often ask who was wrong between Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto. Was it Suguru, for leaving without explaining? Or was it Satoru, for not noticing that his best friend had been falling apart right in front of him?

It is easy to choose a side when you only look at the ending.

Satoru remembered Suguru leaving. One day, his best friend was there and then, somehow, he wasn’t. There was no proper explanation and no conversation that could make sense of what had happened. Just distance, silence, and a person he had known for years suddenly becoming someone he could no longer reach. To Satoru, it felt like being abandoned without being given a chance to understand. He thought, If something was wrong, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you decide everything on your own? Why did you leave without letting me try to stop you? And perhaps that was the part that hurt the most, not simply that Suguru left but that Satoru never knew he was supposed to ask him to stay.

Yet Suguru remembered things differently. He remembered the days when he stopped smiling the way he used to. The moments when something inside him grew heavier and heavier, even though he never knew how to put it into words. He remembered being beside Satoru and still feeling terribly alone and somewhere along the way, he began to think that maybe Satoru should have noticed because wasn’t Satoru the person who knew him best? Didn’t he know when Suguru was tired? Didn’t he know when something was wrong? Didn’t he notice that the person standing beside him was slowly becoming someone else? Suguru never said, I’m not okay but perhaps, in his own way, he thought he had been saying it all along in the silence, in the distance, in the way his laughter disappeared, in the way he stopped reaching out. He thought Satoru would understand because sometimes, when someone has known you for long enough, you stop believing you have to explain every wound.

And that was where everything went wrong. Satoru was waiting for Suguru to speak and Suguru was waiting for Satoru to notice, neither of them realized they were waiting for something from the other, so they kept waiting until waiting became distance and distance became a decision and eventually, the person who once stood beside you became someone you could only remember.

Maybe that was why, years later, asking who was wrong felt almost meaningless because Satoru was right, Suguru should have told him and Suguru was right too, Satoru could have noticed. Both of them had a point, both of them had a wound, both of them had been waiting to be understood and perhaps that was the tragedy of them. They knew each other so well that they forgot something very simple: Knowing someone is not the same as understanding everything they never say. Sometimes, even the person who knows you best cannot read your silence correctly, sometimes you have to say, “I’m hurting”, sometimes you have to ask, “Are you okay?” and sometimes, even when both people love each other deeply, they can still miss each other in the space between those two sentences.

Maybe Suguru wasn’t wrong for leaving, maybe Satoru wasn’t wrong for feeling abandoned, maybe they were simply two people standing on opposite sides of the same silence, each believing the other could hear what was never spoken and by the time they finally understood that they had been looking at the same ending from completely different perspectives, it was already too late.

One thought, “You left without telling me.” The other thought, “I was falling apart right in front of you.” And perhaps the saddest part was that both of them were telling the truth, so if someone asked who was wrong between them, maybe the answer was neither, maybe they were just two people who loved each other, knew each other deeply, and still failed to understand what the other needed and sometimes, that’s how people lose each other. Not because one stopped caring, not because one person was entirely at fault but because two people can love each other and still speak completely different languages when it comes to pain.