365days between us

Chapter 2

Rain tapped softly against the window, a slow rhythm like a heartbeat that refused to be rushed. Betty and Tessa voices were heard arguing so loud in the next room about who looks more like mom and dad.

“…the woman at the market said I look exactly like mom when she was my age….” Tessa’s voice was heard again after some minutes silence.

Elsa hasn’t open the message from minutes ago. She felt it wasn’t something she would want to give attention. “It’s probably from one of those boys”.

She sat up curled on her bed, knees drawn to her chest, notebook open but pen still because tonight, the story she wanted to write wasn’t one she could put on paper. The story was already written. It lived in her chest, worn soft at the edges from years of being replayed.

She closed her eyes, and just like that, the room dissolved.

In her mind, it was harmattan season, years ago, dust hanging gold in the afternoon light. Ferdinand was seventeen, tall for his age, with that laugh that made even strangers turn and smile without knowing why. They sat on the low wall outside her father’s compound, shoulders almost touching, sharing a bag of groundnuts like it was the last meal on earth.

“When we grow up,” young Elsa had said, cracking a shell between her fingers, “we should get married.”

Ferdinand had laughed, not mockingly, but the way boys laugh when a thing feels both silly and true at once. “Married? You’re bossy. I’ll be under your leg forever.”

“Better under my leg than under someone else’s,” she’d replied, and he’d laughed so hard that he nearly choked on a groundnut, and she’d had to pound his back while laughing too, and somewhere in that ordinary, dusty afternoon, she had decided quietly, permanently, that he was going to be her husband one day.

She opened her eyes. The rain had gotten heavier.

In her imagination, over the years, she had built entire wings of a house that didn’t exist. A version where Ferdinand showed up at her convocation with flowers. A version where he knelt in front of her sisters, nervous and grinning, asking her father for her hand. A version where they argued over paint colors for a nursery. She had lived entire decades with him in the architecture of her own mind, decades he knew nothing about, decades that were hers alone to build and hers alone to grieve.

Because reality had come, as it always does, uninvited and without mercy.

Somewhere along the years, Ferdinand had started introducing her as “my best friend” with a comfort so natural it had cracked something in her. Not “my girlfriend”, not “the girl I like” but just “best friend”. And when she’d tried, once, clumsily, to test the waters. A joke wrapped around a truth, the way girls do when they’re too afraid to be sincere. He had laughed it off with the ease of someone who had never once considered the alternative.

“Ah ah, Elsa, why would you spoil what we have? Some things are better left as they are. You’re irreplaceable to me as my best friend.”

She had smiled that day. She always smile. It was easier than explaining that his words had landed like a door closing somewhere deep inside her, one she hadn’t even realized she’d left open for so long.

And so she had made peace with it or told herself she had. Because if she pushed, if she confessed the years of imagined weddings and imagined children and imagined arguments over paint colors, she risked more than heartbreak. She risked losing him entirely. A failed romance could survive as an ache. A failed friendship, built on the wreckage of a confession he didn’t want, might not survive at all.

Better to keep him as a friend forever, she told herself, than to lose him completely trying to make him something he never chose to be.

She picked the pen back up, and instead of writing his name, she wrote initials. She always did that to disguise him in her stories as “F,” gave him different faces, different professions, let him love fictional women who looked nothing like her, because somehow watching him love someone else, even a version she’d invented, hurt less than facing the fact that he simply never would.

Later that night, after her sisters had gone quiet in the next room and the rain had softened into a drizzle, a different thought crept in, one that had been circling her for longer than she wanted to admit.

She sat up and walked to the small mirror propped against her wall, studying herself the way one studies a stranger. Petite, barely reaching the shoulders of most men she knew. Slim in a way that made her clothes hang looser than she wanted. Her face, was it pretty? She genuinely didn’t know anymore. She had been told she was intelligent so many times that the word had started to feel like a consolation prize, the thing people said about a girl when they’d run out of other compliments to give.

Maybe I’m too small, she thought. Maybe I’m not curvy enough. Maybe I talk too much, or too little, or maybe….”

Her thoughts spiraled, each one sharper than the last, carving out a familiar hollow in her chest the same hollow that had first opened the day Ferdinand called her “irreplaceable” and meant it in exactly the way she never wanted him to.

She turned off the light and lay in the dark, arms wrapped around herself.

And it was in that darkness, in that exact moment of quiet defeat, that her phone lit up on the pillow beside her, the same unread message from hours ago, still waiting.

She reached for it this time.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.” A new message from UNKNOWN”