France smelled of sea salt and new beginnings, yet Elara never quite settled. The sky above her new town seemed borrowed from another world—too pale, too wide, too strange—and the voices that drifted past her window carried accents she could never imitate. Her English books, stacked neatly on the shelf beside her bed, gathered dust, their spines curling like old wounds. Each one reminded her of Leeds, of streets she had known like the back of her hand, and of him, whose memory clung to her like a shadow she could not shake.
She began to write letters.
At first, they were timid, careful things—small talk about weather, books, and the occasional observation about the markets she wandered through, hesitant to admit her loneliness. But with each letter, her words grew braver. She told him about the sea, how the waves struck the cliffs like urgent hands. She wrote of the markets, where the scents of bread, cheese, and herbs mingled in the air, and of the quiet nights when the house felt too large and too empty. She confessed to missing the ordinary sounds of home, the familiar rhythms of a life she had left behind.
His replies were uneven, scrawled, sometimes messy, but always full of him. Half-finished sentences slipped into confessions that made her cheeks burn. He missed Leeds. He missed her. He had begun learning the guitar, and occasionally, he sent lyrics—lines that seemed written only for her, notes of longing and unspoken promises that made her pulse quicken.
At night, she pressed the letters to her chest, letting the warmth of the paper settle against her skin as though it carried his presence. She traced the words with her fingers, whispered them aloud in the dark, and sometimes allowed herself to imagine him reading her letters, smiling at her thoughts, laughing at the private jokes she had tucked into the margins.
Then, one month, the letters stopped.
She waited. Two weeks, then three. Each morning she checked the post, hope tightening in her chest, and each day the absence became sharper, a hollow growing where anticipation once lived. She told herself it was the postal service, a storm, some earthly inconvenience—but in the quiet moments, she knew the truth: something had shifted.
Her father said the post was unreliable. Her mother advised her not to dwell on childish things. But their words were weak against the ache in her chest. She wrote one last letter, trembling as she put pen to paper: Are you all right? Did I do something wrong? She sealed it with the care of a ritual, sent it into the void, and held her breath, praying for a reply that never came.
Autumn arrived, turning the streets outside golden and brittle. Elara packed the letters into a box and hid it beneath her bed. But some nights, when the wind rattled the shutters and carried the scent of distant rain, she could almost taste lilacs again, their sweetness twisting the ache in her chest. She remembered the stolen kiss—the heat, the tremor, the unspoken promise—and it returned to her like a heartbeat she could not quiet. She replayed every moment, wondering if she had misread him, if she had pushed too hard or waited too long, if she had been too eager, too hesitant, too young to know what she wanted.
Sometimes she dreamed of him walking through the streets of Leeds, catching her eye with a smile that left her breathless, as if no time had passed at all. Other times, she imagined letters arriving, filled with explanations, apologies, words that would mend the hollow inside her chest. She woke from these dreams with a sharp, unfamiliar ache, wishing she could undo the past or reclaim a courage she had not yet learned to summon.
And always, in the quiet, there remained the whisper of what might have been. The memory of him lingered in the corners of her room, in the weight of her letters, in the ache of the wind against the shutters. She did not know if she had lost him forever—or if he had simply been waiting for her, somewhere beyond the reach of her fragile, longing heart. But she held onto the hope, fragile and impossible, that one day, some thread might pull them back together, that the letters, the kisses, the silences could converge once more.
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