Ten Years Later
The ring caught the afternoon light, scattering a thin arc across the kitchen wall. She found herself staring at it as the kettle began to hum, the same kettle she’d once lifted for another man. That life was ten years gone, yet the habit of remembering had its own sly persistence.
She was engaged now. A good man, steady in speech, kind in silence, patient with her storms. With him, words had found their proper weight—not daggers in an argument, not swallowed in silence, but a bridge between them. She wore his promise on her hand, and it felt earned.
And then came the letter.
His name written awkwardly, the pen strokes uneven. The man from the past—the one who had lived beside her in gestures more than words—was looking for her again. A decade had passed since their half-understood conversations, their shared laughter in crowded streets, their fragile, wordless peace.
She had once thought of him as a sanctuary from the noise of constant quarrel. With him, silence was not an absence but a kind of home. Yet she remembered also the loneliness that grew there, how her thoughts accumulated with no place to go, how intimacy dimmed when voice was denied.
Now he was back, or trying to be. And the question pressed itself upon her:
Is there room for him in the life she is building?
Path One: Letting Him In, Even Briefly
She imagined replying to the letter. A meeting in a quiet café. He would smile the same way, slightly shy, slightly proud. His English perhaps better now, hers still stumbling in his tongue. They would speak in fragments, but memory would rush to fill the gaps.
She could picture herself laughing at something small, surprised at how quickly the rhythm returned. A dangerous nostalgia: the sweetness of what once was, untouched by the years that followed. She might feel, for a moment, the temptation of a parallel life—the path not taken, the marriage not pursued.
To let him in would mean testing the edges of her own fidelity. Not betrayal, perhaps, but a crack in the wall she and her fiancé had built together. Could she carry both—the love she had chosen and the love she once left—without them colliding?
Some part of her wanted to believe that closure required seeing him once more. Another part knew closure could also mean silence.
Path Two: Keeping the Door Closed
She folded the letter, placed it back in its envelope, and tucked it into a drawer she rarely opened. The engagement ring shimmered on her hand, steady, grounding.
This path was not about erasing him, nor pretending their past had been trivial. He had been important—a respite, a lesson, a mirror. But importance did not equal permanence. Their season had ended.
By choosing not to answer, she honored the life she had now. She refused to let nostalgia unspool the threads of commitment she was weaving. She accepted that some relationships serve as bridges: meant to be crossed, not lived upon.
The drawer would hold the letter, the memory, the ghost. She would hold the present.
Ten Years in the Balance
The tea steamed in her cup. She lifted it slowly, inhaling the warmth.
In the end, the choice was less about him and more about who she wanted to be at this stage of her life: a woman still peering backward, or one stepping fully into what she had built.
The old soldier Thomas had once faced a similar choice in her imagination—whether to take Fatima’s hand and avoid the civil war of faiths, or stay bound to a conflict not of his making. His choice had been hers to invent. But her own was different: this time no story could decide for her.
She smiled faintly. Ten years ago she might have opened the door just to see. Now, she wondered if strength meant not opening at all.
The tea was hot, fragrant, alive. She drank it down, and the knock from the past faded into silence.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc.
Travel in Life 