Dear Andréa

III

She was overcome with feelings that felt nowhere close to happiness or joy. It took over at every waking moment -- when she woke up during the night and constantly creeping when she was awake for the rest of the day.

In hindsight, there had not been much change in her life, no matter how much she changed. This constant feeling was present whenever she was unable to feed her mind with endless distractions. What she did or did not do, no longer seemed to matter.

It felt like a Sunday.

Sundays were not happy days. They were not quite busy and not quite relaxing either. The sound of the want cutting through the uncomfortable and lonely silence made her feel sick to her stomach. Sundays felt like coming down from the adrenaline of acid. Lately, every day felt like a Sunday.

The uneventful air that caressed the back of her neck felt like a portal to all the negative and unwelcome emotions. It reminded her of everything she had worked so hard to escape from. Her whole life, Lanna had been chasing one single thing - happiness. It just seemed unavailable to her. It made it easy to imagine that something was broken within her.

Her whole life, Lanna was never physically alone. Yet, the feeling of loneliness had made her push everyone away, so much so that when people walked away on their own, it was easy to think that it had all been her fault -- just like Andréa.

A thought crossed Lanna's mind. She imagined herself, fully dressed, floating in an endless ocean in the dark. The feeling of the water current brushed against her, pushing her from side to side and she would not react. Her eyes were open, fixed on the stars in a dark sky, watching her from light years away. The world was dormant and she was nothing more than a hollow shell.

Lanna wished she could spend her life floating away without the need to swim and struggle, allowing the current of nature to consume her essence.

Her fingers brushed over the edge of the envelope where she sealed her thoughts and feelings to Andréa once again. She opened the top right drawer of her desk, where a pile of envelopes was buried, letters she had been writing every so often over the past years. They all had stamps on them, enough to carry them halfway across the earth, back home, where Andréa still lived.

"I wonder how she would react to the words," she wondered.

She imagined a few different scenarios if she were to send them. In most of them, the letters only get lost in international shipping, finding their way to a random person a hundred years after they would both already be dead. In the case where Andréa does receive them, Andréa imagined her burning them away with her lighter, the fire reflecting in her glossy brown eyes. Andréa used to love to romance behind watching words burn on paper.

In one scenario, the one that keeps her writing them, Andréa reads them, unable to write back but reminiscent of the innocent feelings they once held for each other. A dark secret, hidden deep within where no one else could find them.

They say everything heals with time, but some wounds just stay as is, unable to heal while also being unable to seek healing. 

The image of her body floating in a deep and dark ocean crossed her mind again.

"For the sake of the watchful stars," Lanna thought, as she wrote the address on the back of the envelope and closed the drawer. She carried the letter with her, walking outside her apartment to the nearest postal box. She held on to it tightly as the letter hung halfway inside the postal box. These would be words she would not be able to take back.

Heavy with words, Lanna let go. The letter fell inside with a thud, carrying the weight of Lanna's heartfelt emotions. The rest would be up to the current of life, to decide on the outcome of her story as she floated like a shell craving to feel complete again.