ᴊᴜꜱᴛ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴏɴᴄᴇ | ᴷ.ˢᴺ

| ᴾᴿᴼᴸᴼᴳᵁᴱ |

Isn't it funny, how day by day, nothing changed. But when you look back, everything is different.

And by everything, I mean myself too. I wasn't the same person I was five years ago. The bubbly, positive, free-spirited girl who used to find joy in the simplest things was replaced by someone colder, duller, more reserved. Someone who rarely left her room anymore. I wasn't sure if my parents noticed the change in me. If they had, they probably chalked it up to puberty, like they always did over the past few years.

The one thing that hadn't changed, though, was his terrifying resilience—how he never truly left my mind. No matter how far apart we were, his image was always there, lingering at the forefront of my thoughts. Distracting. His name came to me at the most random times, memories of us blurring the line between dreams and reality.

Sometimes, I wondered if this was how my life would be—stuck, a useless girl who couldn't seem to carry the weight of a broken promise made by her best friend half a decade ago. Embarrassingly enough, the years had passed in a blur, yet I couldn't ignore the glaring truth: the damage was still there.

I couldn't deny I was in a better place than I was back then, but that feeling was nothing more than a dull throb in the back of my mind, as cold and distant as ice, fading in and out like a memory I had no control over. It felt like I'd been living in that one moment for years.

He'd probably moved on.

No, scratch that—he had obviously moved on.

He was the one who walked away. He was the one who broke our promise and left me behind, forcing me to pick up the pieces of something that would never be whole again. Like a chair that wobbled for the rest of its life or a wall with a dent no amount of paint could cover—some things just couldn't be fixed entirely, no matter how much you tried.

I hated it. I hated that part of me couldn't hate him just as much as I hated myself.

A part of me wished I had realized my feelings sooner. But another part wished I never had feelings at all, because I knew deep down that was what ruined whatever we had.

I wanted everything to go back to the way it was—back to the time when we knew each other like the back of our hands, back when I could read him like an open book.

But I wasn't the only one who'd changed. He had built a wall around himself, one that I couldn't get past. While everyone else could waltz right through the gates, I was left standing on the other side, watching.

I was desperate to get my shit together and move on, but there was one thing holding me back: hope. A dangerous emotion—one that had probably ruined more lives than I cared to count. But it could also be the reason for many happy endings - for the people who'd been too deep in or resilient enough to hold onto that thin thread of hope long enough to recover what they've lost.

As pleasing as that idea sounded, I knew that for me, this was the end game. Yet, here I was, floating on delusion, with nothing but that fragile thread of hope keeping me from falling.

I was being reckless.

This was stupid.

But I needed something to move me from the spot I'd been stuck in for the past five years. Even if it was a reckless decision, one that could very well make everything worse. Whether it moved me forward or backward, it didn't matter anymore.

Like they say, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Besides, there was a chance this could eventually help me move on... right?

Well whatever happenes, it was too late now. I've already made up my mind, if only to make myself feel a bit better. After all, that's what I had been hoping for all along.

I'm going to do it.

I'm going to write a letter.

To someone who failed to lose the special duality they held over me.

To someone who broke everything our friendship had been, without ever giving me a simple explanation.

To someone who was once upon a time my best friend.

To the boy who was once my everything—and could have been more—who'd left me at my lowest. 

ᥫ᭡.