We Never Said Goodbye - By Tenuli Perera

Written By: Tenuli Perera

Category: Short Story

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Tenuli Perera presents a poignant short story titled "We Never Said Goodbye" in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. This captivating narrative delves into themes of love, loss, and survival amidst the harsh realities of war. Through the eyes of Arun, we explore a world torn apart by conflict, where relationships are tested and identities are reshaped. Perera's storytelling captures the emotional turmoil and resilience of those caught in the crossfire, offering a profound reflection on what it means to hold on to love in the face of unimaginable circumstances.

About the Work

"We Never Said Goodbye" is an evocative exploration of love and loss, set against the backdrop of war. The narrative mood is somber, yet deeply moving, as it vividly portrays the internal conflict of a soldier faced with a heart-wrenching choice. Perera employs a lyrical literary style, weaving together poignant imagery and emotional depth. The story's message is one of enduring love and the devastating consequences of conflict, leaving readers to ponder the cost of survival and the impact of choices made in moments of desperation.

We Never Said Goodbye

Original Submission by Tenuli Perera

We Never Said Goodbye

By Tenuli Perera

He had to kill her.

The order had been given before sunrise, when the camp was still half asleep and the ground beneath their boots was wet from the previous night's rain. There were people gathered beyond the barricades, too many to count properly, and he had been told what to do with them. It was not the first time he had been given an order like this. It would not be the first time he obeyed.

Still, his fingers would not stop trembling around the rifle.

Beside him, someone was complaining about the cold. Another man spat into the mud and told the younger soldiers to stand straight, to stop looking at the prisoners as though they had anything to do with them. They were enemies now, all of them. That was what they had been told. Enemies did not need names, or histories, or families waiting for them somewhere beyond the hills. They needed to be dealt with.

He looked at the people lined up in front of them. An old man with a bloodied sleeve. A mother trying to keep her son quiet. A girl who couldn't have been more than fifteen, staring at the ground with the peculiar stillness of someone who had already learned that crying did not change anything.

He looked away.

He had known, once, a girl who cried when she was angry and laughed when she was nervous. A girl who stole the papadam from his lunch and denied it even when he caught her with them between her teeth. A girl who used to sit beside him in class and whisper entire conversations while the teacher was writing on the board, then turn around and act as though she had never spoken a word in her life.

That was before the checkpoints appeared on the roads. Before their school closed. Before people began leaving their homes in the middle of the night with whatever they could carry.

Back then, the worst thing he could imagine was being separated from her when they finished school.

He had been a fool.

They had been in the same class since they were eleven, though Arun could not remember exactly when he started noticing Maya. There had been no great moment, no music playing in the background, no sudden understanding that his life had changed. She had simply become a part of his days, so gradually that he only realised how much space she occupied when he tried to imagine a day without her.

She sat beside the window because she liked the light, even when it made it difficult for her to see the blackboard. He sat beside her because the seat next to his friends was always taken, or so he claimed. She borrowed his pens and returned them without their caps. He carried an extra one after a while, a cheap blue pen that he kept specifically for her, though he would rather have swallowed it than admit that to anyone.

At lunch, she talked about leaving.

Not because she hated their town, she insisted, but because she wanted to know what existed beyond it. She wanted to see the sea from somewhere other than the small stretch of beach their families visited during holidays. She wanted to travel by train without a relative asking where she was going and when she would return. She wanted to study, find a job, earn her own money and buy clothes without having to explain why she needed them.

He used to laugh at her plans.

"You haven't even learned to cook rice properly," he told her once.

"And you have?"

"I can learn."

"So can I."

"Then we'll both learn."

She had looked at him for a moment, her chin resting on her folded arms. The classroom had been almost empty, the afternoon heat pressing against the windows while a ceiling fan clicked above them. She had been wearing the same white uniform she wore every day, the sleeves rolled up because she complained that the weather was trying to kill her.

"Fine," she said. "You cook. I'll earn the money."

He had grinned. "And where are we going?"

"Anywhere."

It had seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan.

Their relationship had grown in the spaces between ordinary things. Walking home together when their friends had already left. Waiting outside tuition classes. Sharing earphones on the bus, one of them always complaining that the other had terrible taste in music. Arguments about the smallest things, followed by the equally small apologies that neither of them was ever willing to make first.

Maya was the one who first held his hand, though she would later insist that he had been the one reaching for hers. They had been standing near the school gate, surrounded by students waiting for their parents, and she had caught his fingers before he could say goodbye.

He remembered looking at their hands and then at her.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"Then stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like an idiot."

He had laughed, and she had held on until her mother arrived.

They were young. They thought there would be time for everything.

The first time Arun heard gunfire close enough to recognise it, he was walking home from school.

He remembered the sound more clearly than anything that followed. It was sharper than the explosions he had heard in the distance, less like thunder and more like something being torn apart. People ran before anyone explained what had happened. A man pulled a child behind a shop. Someone shouted for everyone to get inside. He stood in the middle of the road, his schoolbag hanging from one shoulder, wondering why nobody was telling him what to do.

By the end of the week, his mother had begun keeping their important documents in a plastic bag near the door.

By the end of the month, his father had stopped going to work regularly.

By the end of the year, the school had closed.

The changes came so quickly that he could not remember the exact day their lives stopped being normal. There was no final morning when they had all sat in class and understood that it was the last time they would do so. There were only rumours, cancelled lessons, missing teachers, and parents who had begun arriving early to collect their children. One day, they were complaining about examinations. The next, they were discussing which roads were safe enough to travel.

Arun and Maya continued meeting whenever they could. Sometimes they spoke over the phone. Sometimes they saw each other for a few minutes near her house, while their families pretended not to notice how often they found reasons to be in the same place.

Then her family began talking about leaving.

He remembered her telling him on a hot afternoon, standing behind the house where the neighbours could not hear them. Her hair was tied back, and she kept pulling at the loose thread on her sleeve.

"We might have to go north," she said.

"How far north?"

"I don't know."

"When will you come back?"

She stopped pulling at the thread.

"I don't know that either."

He hated her for that answer, although he knew it was not her fault. He hated the way she could say something so terrible in such a quiet voice. He wanted her to promise that she would return, that this was temporary, that they would sit together again and complain about examinations they would never have to take.

Instead, he asked when he would see her again.

"Tomorrow, maybe."

"Maybe?"

"I'll call you."

He nodded, pretending that was enough.

They did not meet the next day.

Her house was empty when he went looking for her. The door was open, a few pieces of furniture remained, and a cooking pot sat upside down beside the sink. There were marks on the floor where something heavy had been dragged. He called her number until the call stopped going through. He asked people who knew her family, then people who knew people who might have known her family. Everyone had heard something different. They had gone to stay with relatives. They had crossed a checkpoint. They had been seen in a village several hours away.

Nobody knew anything for certain.

He kept waiting for her to call.

For a while, he was angry with her. He told himself she could have found a way to contact him if she had wanted to. He told himself that perhaps she had forgotten him already, that perhaps everything they had meant to each other had been nothing more than the sort of thing young people said when they had not yet discovered how easily life could take things away.

Then he hated himself for thinking it.

He did not know where she was. He did not know whether she had food or somewhere to sleep. He did not know if she had made it out safely, or whether she was sitting somewhere thinking about him too.

He knew only that she was gone, and the world had carried on as if that were an ordinary thing.

Arun joined the armed group months later.

There were many reasons he could have given, and he repeated different ones depending on who asked. He wanted to protect his family. He wanted to defend his people. He wanted to stop what was happening to their town. Sometimes he believed those things. Sometimes he was not sure what he believed at all.

The truth was that he was young, frightened, angry, and tired of feeling useless.

The men who came to recruit him spoke as though they understood everything. They knew who was responsible for the suffering, who deserved revenge, who could be trusted, and who could not. They offered him a place among people who seemed certain of what they were doing. They gave his anger a direction and called it purpose.

He told his mother he would be safer with them than wandering around without protection. She cried when he said it, but he mistook her tears for fear of losing him rather than fear of what he was becoming.

He left before he could change his mind.

At first, he thought the worst part would be the training. His body ached constantly, his hands blistered, and he learned to sleep through noises that would once have kept him awake. He learned to follow instructions without asking too many questions. He learned which men to avoid when they were drinking and which ones to listen to when they spoke quietly.

He also learned that there was always another reason to keep fighting.

The villages they passed through were described to them as dangerous. The people who fled were described as collaborators. Every dead man had been a threat, every empty house had belonged to someone who had helped the enemy. If they found a child carrying messages, the child was no longer simply a child. If they found a woman who refused to answer their questions, her silence became proof that she was hiding something.

He began to understand that a person could be made into an enemy long before anyone knew what they had done.

He did not always agree. He did not always speak up either.

The first time he watched a man die, he could not eat afterwards. An older soldier slapped him on the back and told him he would get used to it. The others laughed, and he laughed with them because he did not know what else to do.

He did get used to certain things. The smell of smoke clinging to his clothes. The way people looked at a uniform before they looked at his face. The heavy quiet after an operation, when nobody wanted to discuss what had happened but everyone seemed to remember it.

He did not get used to the letters he sometimes received from home, or to the names of villages he recognised from childhood, or to the fact that he could go weeks without thinking about Maya and then remember her so suddenly that it felt like being struck.

He wondered whether she had left the country. Whether she had found work. Whether she had met someone who could give her the life they had once imagined together. He told himself he hoped she had. He tried to mean it.

He also wondered whether she was alive.

That question became a place he returned to whenever the nights were too quiet.

The first rumour reached him through a man who had come from a village near the border. The man had been speaking to one of the soldiers about families displaced by the fighting. He mentioned a group of young women who had been moved from place to place, passed between men who paid for them, kept them, or sent them elsewhere when they no longer wanted them.

He spoke about it without lowering his voice.

Arun, who was no longer quite a boy, sat nearby cleaning his rifle. He had not been listening until he heard the name of the village where Maya had lived.

He looked up.

"Which families?" he asked.

The man shrugged. He had heard it from someone else, who had heard it from a driver. There were women whose families had run out of money. Women who had lost their parents. Women who had been promised work and found themselves unable to leave. Some had been forced. Some had gone with strangers because there had been nothing left to eat at home. Some had been moved so often that the people telling their stories no longer knew where they had started.

The man could not tell him whether she was among them.

That night, Arun lay awake listening to the men around him breathe. He tried to imagine Maya somewhere safe, doing something ordinary. Washing clothes. Standing in a queue for food. Arguing with someone about a price. He tried to imagine her with the same impatience she had always carried, still wanting to see the sea, still determined to earn her own money and make her own choices.

Then he imagined her being taken somewhere against her will, and he had to sit up because he could not breathe properly.

He wanted to go looking for her. He wanted to throw away the uniform, find his way back to the roads they had walked together, and search every place he could reach. But there were orders to follow and battles to fight, and he had become a man who could explain why he could not do the one thing he wanted most.

He told himself that if he survived, he would find her.

He had made promises before. He did not know whether this one was any different.

The older soldiers had a particular way of speaking about mercy.

They treated it as a weakness that had to be removed before it could get a man killed. They spoke of the young recruits as if their hesitation were an illness, something that could be beaten out of them with enough insults and enough time in the field. A soldier who questioned an order was useless. A soldier who looked at a prisoner and saw a person was dangerous. A soldier who could not pull a trigger had no place among them.

The younger men learned to keep their doubts to themselves.

One afternoon, after a group of civilians had been detained near a road, a recruit asked whether the women and children could be allowed to leave. They had been searched. They had no weapons. Most of them were exhausted, and one child had been crying for so long that his voice had become a thin, broken sound.

"Where do you think they'll go?" an older soldier asked.

The recruit glanced towards the hills. "Home, maybe."

The older man laughed.

"Home? You think this is a game? You think someone is going to thank you for letting them go? You think you know who these people are?"

"They're civilians."

"And you know that how?"

The recruit had no answer.

The older soldier stepped closer and spoke quietly enough that the others had to listen.

"You want to be a good person? Go home. Find a field, grow vegetables, marry a woman, and have children who never have to know what you've done. But you are here now. You wear this uniform. You follow orders. If you cannot understand that, you will get the rest of us killed."

Nobody spoke after that.

The recruit looked at the prisoners. Then he looked at the ground.

When he was told to move them, he did.

Arun watched him and recognised the look on his face. He had worn it himself once, in the first weeks, before he learned to lower his eyes and let the moment pass. He wanted to tell the recruit that he was not wrong to ask. He wanted to tell him that there were things a man should refuse to do, even if refusing cost him something.

Instead, he checked the magazine in his rifle.

He had become very good at silence.

The prisoners arrived before dawn.

They had been found travelling with a larger group of displaced families and were suspected of carrying information for the other side. No one explained what evidence had been found, or whether there had been any at all. The orders came down from men who were not present, and the soldiers on the ground were told to carry them out.

There were children among them. There were old people who could barely stand. A woman had wrapped a piece of cloth around her head, and the ends were stiff with dried blood. One man kept asking for his brother until another soldier told him to shut up.

Arun stood with the others, his rifle hanging from his shoulder.

He tried not to look at their faces.

It was easier that way. A face could make you hesitate. A face could remind you of someone who had once sat beside you in a classroom, someone who had brought you food when you were sick, someone who had asked you to remember to buy milk on the way home. The men had taught him to look at hands instead, to watch for sudden movements, to remember that a person could appear frightened and still be dangerous.

So he looked at their hands.

A woman held a little girl by the wrist. An old man pressed a hand against his ribs. A young woman near the back kept her arms close to her body, as though she were cold. Her hair had been cut unevenly, and her clothes hung loosely on her frame. She stood with her head lowered, but every so often she glanced towards the soldiers, searching their faces for something.

Arun looked at her only briefly.

There was no reason to look again.

The officer began reading out the instructions. The prisoners were to be separated. Those suspected of assisting the enemy would be questioned. The rest would be dealt with according to the orders already given. The words were delivered in the same voice a teacher might use to explain an examination timetable, and the soldiers listened with the blank attention of men who had heard too many instructions to care about the sound of them.

Then the woman at the back lifted her head.

Arun knew her eyes.

It was a ridiculous thing to recognise first, when so much else had changed. Maya's face was thinner than he remembered. The little crease between her eyebrows had deepened. There was a mark near her cheekbone, yellowing at the edges, and she kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other as though standing still hurt. But her eyes were the same. He knew the way they narrowed when she was trying to make sense of something, the way she seemed to look straight through people when she was angry.

For a moment, he was back in the classroom, watching her try to read a question on the blackboard through the glare of the afternoon sun.

Then she looked at him properly.

Her lips parted.

She did not say his name. Perhaps she was afraid to. Perhaps she could not believe it was him. Perhaps she had looked at so many faces over the past few years that she had learned not to trust what she saw.

But he knew.

He knew her, and she knew him, and suddenly the years between them seemed both impossibly long and cruelly short.

Arun had spent so much time wondering where she was that he had never properly imagined what he would do if he found her.

Now he knew.

He would stand in a line with men who did not know her. He would hold a rifle in hands she had once held in hers. He would listen while someone decided what she deserved, and he would be expected to obey.

He wanted to call out to her. He wanted to tell her to run, although there was nowhere to run. He wanted to ask if she had seen the sea, if she had eaten that morning, if she still hated the heat, if she had ever found a way to leave the place they had grown up in. He wanted to ask why she had not come back, though he knew perfectly well that she had never been given the choice.

Instead, he stood still.

The little girl beside Maya tugged at her hand. Maya bent towards the child and whispered something. The girl looked up at her, then at the soldiers, and moved closer until her shoulder pressed against Maya's side.

Arun wondered whether she was someone's daughter. Whether she had been born into the war or had once known what it was like to worry about schoolwork and sweets and getting home before dark. He wondered how many people had told her what to do, how many doors had closed behind her, how many times she had had to keep moving because there was nowhere safe to stay.

He wondered if Maya remembered their plans.

He remembered them so clearly that it almost seemed cruel. The blue pen. The school gate. The afternoon when she had held his hand and called him an idiot. Her voice saying “anywhere”, as if the world were a place they could simply choose to enter.

He had loved her then.

He loved her now, though he had no idea what that meant anymore. Love was supposed to be something you could return to, something that waited for you while you were away. But what happened when the person you loved had been changed by things you could not imagine, while you had been changed by things you could not bear to tell her? What happened when there was no proper goodbye, no final argument, no last conversation in which either of you could say that it was over?

They had never broken up.

There had been no time for it. One day they had been two young people making plans, and then there had been roads they could not travel, calls they could not make, and years in which staying alive had become a full-time occupation. Their relationship had not ended. It had simply been left behind, somewhere neither of them could return to.

And now Arun was standing in front of her with a rifle.

"Do you know her?"

The voice beside him made Arun flinch.

He turned. One of the older soldiers was watching him, following the direction of his gaze.

"No," Arun said.

The answer came too quickly.

The soldier studied him for another moment before looking back at the prisoners.

"Then stop staring. You make people nervous."

Arun lowered his eyes.

His mouth tasted bitter. He could feel the sweat gathering beneath his collar despite the morning cold. Somewhere behind him, a man was asking for a cigarette. The officer was still speaking, and the prisoners were being moved into a new line.

Arun looked at Maya once more.

She had turned away from him. Her hand was still wrapped around the little girl's wrist, and she was murmuring something to her. The girl nodded without looking up. Maya smoothed the child's hair with a tenderness so familiar that Arun felt it somewhere beneath his ribs.

Maya had always been good with children. Even at school, when the younger students cried because they could not find their classrooms, she would stop to help them. She had once missed an entire bus because a little boy had lost his mother outside the gate, and she had stayed with him until they found her.

Arun remembered complaining that she had made him wait for nearly an hour.

She had told him that he could have gone home.

He had told her that he knew.

Neither of them had said anything else about it.

Now the little girl clung to her, and he could not stop thinking about how much the girl herself must have needed someone to stay.

He wondered if Maya had been given a choice about anything in the past few years. He wondered how often she had been frightened, how often she had been hungry, how often she had wished for someone to tell her that she did not have to keep being brave. He wondered whether she had thought of him during those moments or whether remembering him had become too painful to bother with.

He wanted to tell her that he had looked for her.

He wanted to tell her that he had been angry, that he had been afraid, that he had spent nights imagining every possible version of her life because imagining was the only thing he could do. He wanted to apologise for every time he had convinced himself that she had forgotten him, every time he had allowed the uncertainty to become resentment because resentment was easier to live with than helplessness.

But there was no place for those words here.

There was only the order.

The officer finished speaking and began assigning the soldiers to their positions.

The men moved without complaint. Some checked their weapons. Others adjusted their boots or muttered to one another. They had done this before, and most of them had already decided what they thought of the people standing in front of them. A few looked angry. A few looked bored. One of the younger soldiers had gone pale, but he kept his eyes fixed ahead.

Arun took his place.

He could feel his heartbeat in his fingers.

He had been taught how to hold the rifle, how to steady his breathing, how to aim without letting his hands shake. He had been taught to think of the target rather than the person, to concentrate on the task rather than what came after. It was supposed to make the work easier.

He raised the weapon.

Maya was standing a few metres away.

She had not looked at him again, but he could see that she knew. Her shoulders had drawn in slightly, and her fingers were pressed against the little girl's hand so tightly that the child tried to pull away. Maya loosened her grip at once, then bent to whisper something in the girl's ear.

The child shook her head.

Maya said it again.

This time, the girl stepped forward, though she kept looking back.

Arun watched Maya guide her towards an older prisoner who was waiting near the end of the line. The old woman held out a hand, and the child took it reluctantly. She turned around one last time, searching for the person who had been holding her.

Maya smiled at her.

It was a small, tired smile. It was the sort of smile someone gave a child when they needed the child to believe that everything was going to be all right.

Arun remembered that smile too.

The rifle grew heavier in his hands.

He could not tell whether Maya was trying to protect the child from what was about to happen or whether she had simply accepted that there were some things she could no longer change. He could not tell whether she was afraid of him, or of the other soldiers, or of the fact that she had finally found him and there was nothing he could do to help her.

He wanted her to look at him.

He wanted her not to.

The officer gave the command.

For a moment, the whole world seemed to narrow to the space between them. He saw the girl who had sat beside him at school, the girl who had stolen his pens and laughed at his terrible jokes, the girl who had once spoken about the future as though it were a place waiting just around the corner. He saw the woman standing before him now, exhausted and frightened, carrying years he knew nothing about.

He wondered what she saw when she looked at him.

A stranger in a uniform? A man who had become part of the thing that had taken everything from her? The boy she had once loved, still standing somewhere behind the weapon, unable to reach her?

Or perhaps she saw none of those things. Perhaps she saw only another soldier, and he had become exactly that.

He had spent years hoping she was alive.

He had imagined finding her in a crowded street, in a village beyond the fighting, in a place where the two of them could finally sit down and speak without having to look over their shoulders. He had imagined her being angry with him for joining the armed group. He had imagined her telling him everything that had happened, and he had imagined listening without interrupting, because she deserved at least that much from him.

He had imagined so many endings that he had forgotten the possibility of this one.

The order was repeated.

Arun could not move.

The soldier beside him muttered something under his breath. The officer turned towards them, his expression hardening. Arun knew what would happen if he refused. He knew what the others would call him, what they might do to him, and what little difference his refusal might make to the people in front of them. He knew all the reasons he had been taught to accept.

He also knew that none of those reasons would matter when he looked back at this morning years from now, if he was lucky enough to have years left.

The woman finally lifted her head.

Their eyes met.

She did not call his name. She did not beg him to remember her. She did not tell him that she loved him, or that she hated him, or that he should have come looking for her sooner. There was no grand farewell between them, no chance to explain the years that had passed or the lives they had been forced to live.

She simply looked at him.

And for one terrible moment, he could see the girl from the classroom in her face. Not because she had remained the same, but because he remembered her so well that even the war had not been able to erase her completely.

She turned around, her back facing the person who would be ordered to kill her.

His finger rested against the trigger.

He wanted to say he was sorry.

He wanted to say that he had never stopped loving her, though he knew that love was a poor excuse for what he was about to do. He wanted to tell her that he had searched for her in every rumour, that he had kept the memory of her alive through years in which he had done things he could never have imagined doing when they were children. He wanted to tell her that he had not known how to save her, and that he was frightened, and that he wished he could be the person she had once believed he would become.

But he said nothing.

He had spent years learning to follow orders, and in all that time, he had never learned how to stop.

The command came again.

Arun looked at the woman he had loved, at the stranger she had become, at the person he had become himself. He thought of their school, of the blue pen, of the sea she wanted to see. He thought of all the tomorrows they had assumed would belong to them.

He had to kill her.

And the worst part was that, somewhere beneath the fear and the uniform and everything he had done to survive, he still loved her.

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, hosted by Hashtag Kalakar, celebrates the diverse voices and stories of writers worldwide. This prestigious event provides a platform for participants to share their unique perspectives through poetry, short stories, and creative writing. As part of a global community, writers explore a multitude of themes, capturing the human experience in its rawest form. The competition is a testament to the power of words in fostering understanding and connection across cultures and borders.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Tenuli Perera for sharing "We Never Said Goodbye" with us. This compelling short story is a valuable contribution to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, offering readers a poignant glimpse into the complexities of love and survival. We appreciate Perera's participation and look forward to witnessing more of her powerful storytelling in the future.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.