Chapter 6 –
---
To You—My Stranger, My Steady Thing,
I had a dream last night. Not the sort that comes laced with wings and symbolism—no, this was visceral. Real. Wretchedly vivid.
In it, I was walking down the aisle.
Not as the bride.
Not even as a bridesmaid.
Just… walking. A guest. A shadow. Watching my younger sister slip her hand into his—the boy I memorised before I knew what memory meant. The boy who once handed me my first fallen tooth wrapped in tissue and said, "This is how you save pain."
God, I hate how I remember that.
I've come to believe that grief isn't just something that comes after death. No. Grief is what happens when hope slowly decays in silence, while you smile through it. It's standing in the middle of everything you've ever wanted, watching it be gifted to someone else—someone who looks like you, but isn't you. Someone who should've known better.
Let me confess something that even the walls of my flat haven't heard.
I knew.
I knew long before they thought I knew.
The glances. The rehearsed distance when we were all together. The way he no longer teased me about my mug obsession or how she'd suddenly start complimenting his cologne—his very specific cologne—that I bought for him three birthdays ago.
How poetic.
My little sister wears my heart as perfume.
But I didn't stop them. I didn't scream or throw things or demand explanations. I let the betrayal grow like mould in the corner of my heart. I let it rot slowly—quietly—because rage is loud, and I've never been allowed to be loud.
Instead, I picked up a pen. And wrote to you.
And you've written back. Time and time again.
You—who don't know my name, nor I yours. And yet, you know my ache better than the ones who should have protected it.
Why does that feel like the safest thing I've ever known?
You asked in your last letter: "Did they ever say sorry?"
No. And that's the worst part.
Because their silence has made me the villain.
It's funny—no, it's cruel—how betrayal never comes with a warning label. It comes disguised as familiarity. As a childhood friend who once protected me from bullies and now avoids my gaze like I'm the storm.
He knew.
He knew I loved him before I did. I told him things no one else knew. I taught him how to slow dance in my living room using shadows on the wall. I used to leave notes in his textbooks just to make him smile when he was struggling in school. I was always the girl next to him, never the girl for him.
But how do you confess to someone who already knows?
He pitied me. I see that now. He pitied me so deeply, he decided to lie.
And she—she just reached out and plucked the one thing I'd never even touched, because I was too afraid to want it too openly.
Was that my mistake?
Was it cowardice that made me unworthy of love?
You wrote, in one of your letters, that "some love stories are meant to break us so we can build ourselves without apology." I reread that line almost every night.
Do you truly believe that?
Because it sounds like something a person only says when they've already been broken beyond recognition.
I want to know you. I shouldn't. But I do. More than that—I crave your mind. Your voice. The way your letters feel like unravelling a new kind of scripture. There's a knowing in your words. A gentleness I never got from anyone else.
And yet, you're across the world.
And I'm still here, living in the belly of a wedding.
My mum asked me to write a speech for the engagement party.
Can you imagine?
I'm to stand beside them. Smile. Speak. Toast.
Celebrate.
What would I even say?
"To my sister, the thief of my pulse. And to him, the architect of my silence."
I won't say that, of course.
I'll probably quote some dead poet and make it sound tender. People will cry and think I'm brave.
Brave.
That's another word people throw at you when they're trying to cover the fact that they didn't see you bleeding.
But here's the twist, dear Stranger—I will show up.
Dressed in my nicest dress, with my eyeliner sharp enough to wound. I'll drink champagne and dance with our cousins and smile until my cheeks cramp.
And then I'll come back home, and I'll write to you again.
Because you're the only one who hasn't asked me to move on.
You let me stay in the ache.
You let me be exactly where I am, without rushing me into healing just to make it easier for everyone else.
There's a kind of intimacy in that, isn't there?
You've asked no questions about my name or my location or what I look like. You've only asked me what it feels like to be me.
No one's ever done that before.
And sometimes, I fear I'm falling into you through these pages. That I've built a home in the gaps between your lines. That if I ever knew your name, it would ruin the spell.
So I don't ask.
But I wonder.
Who are you when you're not writing back to me?
Do you drink your tea hot or lukewarm?
Do you know what it's like to want to scream into your pillow at midnight because love keeps missing your house?
Do you ever see your reflection and ask, "Why not me?"
Because I do.
Every day.
And yet—I'm still here.
Writing. Breathing. Hoping for a kind of redemption that may never come.
This is what it means to survive something soft that kills you slowly.
This is what it means to love wrongly—and to do it with your whole chest.
And maybe, just maybe, this is what it means to find someone on the other side of the world who sees you in the dark and doesn't flinch.
Please write back soon.
Your silence is louder than the wedding bells I'm trying to ignore.
Yours in longing,
J.