“One word of advice son? If she’s the best thing you’ve ever known, don’t make my mistake. Hold onto her. Fight for her. Do everything you can to show her you love her. And if she still doesn’t reciprocate, if it doesn’t work out, at least you know you’d tried.”
His parents exchanged a glance, carrying a weight that Seth only now understood.
The look of love, with all it’s ugly, with all the bad. The look of love, with the sun that promised to always rise after the night. A love that had been dragged through glass, but with wounds that were mended with each other.
When Seth went to his room after lunch, he saw that the mess was still there. The strewn yearbooks, and his old school bag.
It seemed his Dad didn’t want to disturb it anymore, after Seth’s outburst. He gathered the fallen yearbooks, glancing at the years as he piled it atop each other.
2013.The year she fell in love.
2014.The year they formed a friendship.
2017.The year he realised he liked her back.
He placed it on top of his study table, promising to shelve it somewhere better. Somewhere he can be reminded that at one point of time, Nina’s heart was his. Even if it wasn’t anymore.
As he picked up his old school bag, a flash of white caught his eye. It’d flown out of the open zipper.
An envelope.
Wait…
Tossing the bag aside, he carefully picked up the parchment. The years fell away as he felt it between his fingers. Slowly, he unfolded it.
And there, at the top of the paper, his eyes traced the lines of his name, his heart beating furiously with each passing second.
Dear Seth…
And suddenly, he was momentarily back in his 14-year-old body, hovering over the trash can after science, reaching forward toward the paper that lay on top, only slightly crumpled. There, in a neat script that he could never be capable of, was his name.
The letter that Nina had written to him, and intended to pass onto him in class one day. Discarded. Maybe he shouldn’t have grabbed it, but 14-year-old him was much too curious to read what another wrote about him.
Maybe she’d written him in a light that he failed to see.
Foolishly, he’d forgotten that the letter got pushed to the bottom of his bag, stampeded by his textbooks and notebooks. Romantics would claim it to be fate that the letter stayed hidden there, all these years.
Certainly, it must be fate. All of it.
Seth allowed the words to wash over him. He could hear Nina’s voice emanate from the pages, wrapping around him.
He drank in the love she had for him, a love that was now immortalised through her scribbled handwriting. Once he reached the end, he wiped away the tears that’d built up, and forced himself not to cry. He couldn’t stain this letter, this physical affirmation of her love for him, with his tears.
It wasn’t right to just read it.
Seized with purpose, Seth scrambled toward his study desk drawer, and pulled out an old notebook, along with some penshe’d hardly used in years. Ripping out two lone pages, he sat down, and prayed that this time, words don’t fail him.
Please.
For the first time, he fought against the desire to run. To just revert to what he’s comfortable with.
No.
If there is one thing he was certain about, it was his love for Nina.
And so, after all these years, he finally penned a response.
34
