Far Yet Forever

Chapter 06

"Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will." — Suzy Kassem

The morning had already been weighed down with doubts about Aarin, but just as I was trying to push those thoughts aside, my phone buzzed again. I glanced at the screen and felt my heart drop.

It was him—my ex. The one who took me three years to get over. The one who left me shattered and questioning everything I thought I knew about love. And now, here he was, after all this time, with a message I never expected to see.

I’ve been thinking about you. I miss you. Can we talk? Maybe we can be friends?

I stared at the screen, my hands suddenly cold. Three years. It had taken me three painful years to put him behind me, to rebuild the pieces of myself that he broke. I had finally started to move on, finally started to heal. And now, with just a few words, all those old feelings of hurt, confusion, and anger came rushing back.

For a moment, I didn’t know how to respond. Part of me wanted to ignore the message, to pretend I never saw it. But another part of me—the part that still remembered the good times, however fleeting they had been—was tempted to reply. After all, wasn’t it human nature to want closure, even if we knew better?

I sat there, staring at the message, my mind racing back to those days. He had been my first love, the one who made me feel seen, the one who promised forever, only to leave me without warning. The breakup had been brutal, and the silence that followed was even worse. I had spent countless nights crying, wondering what I had done wrong, wondering why I wasn’t enough. It was a pain that had lingered for so long, a shadow that refused to fully disappear.

And now he wanted to be friends?

My first instinct was to laugh at the absurdity of it. After everything he put me through, did he really think we could just go back to being friends? Did he really think I could forget the years of pain, the heartache that still occasionally crept up on me when I least expected it?

But then the doubt set in. What if this was my chance to finally make peace with the past? What if this was the closure I never got?

I took a deep breath and typed out a response, my fingers hesitating over the screen.

Why now? Why after all this time?

His reply came quickly, as if he had been waiting for me.

I’ve been thinking about us a lot lately. I made mistakes, and I regret how things ended. I just miss talking to you.

I read his message over and over, but no matter how many times I tried to make sense of it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t about missing me. It was about easing his guilt, about making himself feel better for what he did. And I wasn’t sure I could give him that.

I sat with the thought for a while. Aarin’s texts had brought a new light into my life, but this message from my past was threatening to pull me back into a darkness I’d worked so hard to escape.

I can’t do this, I finally typed. It took me three years to get over what happened. I’m not going back to that place. I’ve moved on.

It felt liberating to hit send, to choose myself over the temptation of revisiting old wounds. I knew it wasn’t easy, but sometimes, walking away from the past was the only way to protect the future.