Series 2: THE REAL NOTE
I’m still learning how to belong to you without disappearing in the process.
It was raining the night the waiting broke, the heavy, relentless rain that made the city hum like a sad song. He was sitting on the couch, lights dim, scarf still folded on the coffee table, when there was a knock, three soft taps. Almost like she didn’t want to be heard. He froze, for twelve days, he’d imagined this moment in so many ways, running to the door, holding her, demanding answers, saying nothing at all. In the end, his legs moved before his mind caught up.
She was there. Hair damp, raindrops clinging to her lashes. A paper bag in her hands.
“I… made soup,” she said, voice small but steady.
The words were ordinary, but they cracked something open in him. He stepped aside without asking why she’d left or why she’d come back. The hallway light framed her as she entered, and for a second, it felt like the room exhaled.
They didn’t talk much over dinner. She ladled soup into his favourite mug, and he noticed her fingers trembling just slightly. Every glance between them carried a weight too fragile for sudden movements. When the dishes were cleared, she reached into her pocket and slid a folded piece of paper across the table.
“This one… is the real note,” she whispered.
He didn’t open it right away, because at that moment the waiting had ended not with answers, but with her sitting across from him again, soup on the stove, rain against the windows. Whatever the paper said, they would read it together.
The paper sat between them like a fragile truce.
She watched him with that unreadable expression, the one that made him feel both invited and held at a distance. He picked it up slowly, careful not to tear the edges, as though rushing might ruin something sacred.
Her handwriting was the same, looped, neat, just a little tilted to the right. But the words… they were heavier than ink.
I didn’t leave because I stopped loving you; I left because I didn’t know how to stay without losing myself. I’m still learning how to belong to you without disappearing in the process.
He read it twice the spaces between sentences seemed to say more than the words themselves.
“I thought I was losing you,” he murmured.
“You weren’t,” she said, fingers tracing the rim of her mug, but I was losing myself, and I was afraid you wouldn’t notice until it was too late. There it was, the truth, laid bare on the table between them, quiet, painful, and yet strangely tender.
He reached for her hand, and for a moment she didn’t move. Then, slowly, her fingers slid into his. I’m not asking for everything to be fixed tonight,” she said. “I’m asking if we can start again, differently this time.
The rain outside softened, almost as if it was listening. He didn’t promise forever. He didn’t promise it would be easy. But he squeezed her hand and nodded once.
Let’s start, he said, and for the first time in weeks, the air between them felt like a beginning, not an ending.