n13

Swann…

I don’t know how to begin without my voice shaking. I was always good at hiding what I felt, but with you I never could. With you, everything in me becomes transparent.

I’ve thought so many times about that night, about what would have happened if the Abyss hadn’t touched me, if I hadn’t felt that dark call that tore me away from you.

Sometimes I imagine that I came back. That I showed up at your door with the same blue jacket, with the same fear of telling you the truth, with the same desire to stay.

And in that world, Swann, you look at me as if summer never ended. As if I had never been a ghost. As if I could still be your future.

But I’m writing this letter because I know that world doesn’t exist. Because I know I hurt you without meaning to, that I left you with questions I never answered, that I stole a ending you deserved.

And even so… when I think of you, I don’t think of guilt. I think of light. I think of how you looked at me when you thought I wasn’t watching. I think of how your silence said more than my words.

Swann, if I had come back, if I had survived everything, if the Abyss hadn’t cast its shadow over my name… I would have chosen you.

Not as a summer. Not as a memory. Not as a wound.

I would have chosen you as life. As home. As destiny.

And I know you’re somewhere else now, that Autumn holds you, that you’ve learned to live without me. I know. And it makes me happy. Truly happy.

But let me stay here, in this letter, in this corner where I still exist, to tell you what I never could:

I loved you too. I would have searched for you too. I would have come back too. If the world had allowed me.

Kat.