Riley woke up to the sound of his phone buzzing nonstop.

Group chat.

PARTY TONIGHT!!! WE ARE GRADUATING!!!🎉🎉🎉

He stared at the messages for a long time.

He didn't want to go.

But he knew if he stayed home, he would just lie in the dark and think about his mother. So he went.

They met at a small place near the campus. Plastic tables. Red monoblock chairs. Cheap beer in sweating bottles and a playlist nobody could agree on.

They laughed loudly. Talked about memories. Professors they hated. Group mates who disappeared every deadline. Crushes that never happened. Futures that were still shapeless and exciting and terrifying all at once.

For a moment — just a moment — Riley forgot the heaviness in his chest.

He drank more than he should have.

"Bro, you okay?" his friend asked, leaning over.

Riley nodded, smiling lazily. "Yeah. Just happy."

But inside, underneath the noise and the cheap beer and the laughter —

Mom. I did it. I fulfilled my promise to you. I graduated.

He held onto that thought like something fragile.

Like something he had carried a very long distance and was only now, finally, setting down.

His vision blurred.

The voices around him faded slowly, like a radio losing signal.

And darkness wrapped around him — gently, quietly —

The way sleep does when the body has simply had enough.