Chapter 9 : The Distance Between Stars
1125 Words
The city never really slept.
Buses sighed down wet streets, billboards blinked their endless light, and somewhere between the noise and the neon, Arielle typed another page of her story.
College life was everything she’d dreamed of and everything she hadn’t expected.
Professors who pushed her limits. Deadlines that blurred day and night. A world that demanded she become someone new.
Lance was still in Manila, chasing his own dream. His name had begun to appear in small art magazines. He’d even been offered a spot in an international workshop.
They still talked every day at first. Messages. Calls. Letters that smelled faintly of turpentine and coffee.
But slowly, the spaces between replies began to grow.
One night, Arielle sat by her dorm window, her phone glowing in the dark.
The last message from Lance was two days old.
“Painting until morning again. Wish you were here.”
She typed back, “Don’t forget to rest. I miss you.”
Then deleted it. Then retyped it. Then deleted it again.
It wasn’t anger she felt just that aching uncertainty that comes when love stretches across miles.
Weeks passed.
Arielle threw herself into her writing, into contests and readings, into anything that could fill the quiet.
Then one afternoon, while browsing online, she saw a post from a Manila art page:
“Rising artist Lance Rivera collaborates with visual poet Cassie Yulo for new exhibit, Light and Skin.”
Her heart skipped.
The photo beneath showed him smiling beside a girl hair tied up in a messy bun, paint on her hands, standing close. Too close.
She tried not to overthink it.
But that night, her writing stopped mid-sentence.
A few days later, Lance called. His voice sounded tired, like it was coming from another lifetime.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry I’ve been gone a while. Things got… busy.”
“I saw your exhibit,” she said quietly.
He hesitated. “Yeah. Cassie’s a photographer I’m working with. It’s nothing..”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I want to,” he said. “It’s just… I don’t want you to feel left out of my world.”
She smiled faintly, though he couldn’t see it. “Then don’t build a world where I can’t fit.”
Silence. Then a soft sigh. “You’re right.”
“Just promise me something,” she whispered. “That we won’t let distance make us strangers.”
“I promise.”
Promises are strange things.
They don’t break all at once; they fade, quietly, the way colors fade after too much light.
By December, their calls came once a week.
By February, once a month.
And yet, Arielle still waited by the window every night.
Just in case.
One afternoon, her professor announced an upcoming writing fellowship in Manila limited slots, national selection.
Arielle hesitated for days before applying.
When the acceptance email arrived, her heart nearly stopped.
Congratulations!
Venue: Luna Gallery, Manila opening exhibit by featured artist Lance Rivera.
Fate, it seemed, had a cruel sense of humor.
The gallery buzzed with music and applause when she arrived weeks later.
Paintings lined the walls brilliant, haunting. At the center was a new piece: a girl standing in front of a window, but this time, her back was turned.
Arielle froze. She didn’t need a caption to know it was her.
Lance appeared a moment later, paint still on his sleeves.
Their eyes met. For a heartbeat, the noise of the room disappeared.
“You came,” he said.
“I almost didn’t.”
He nodded slowly. “You saw it, didn’t you?”
She looked back at the painting. “You painted the distance.”
He exhaled. “Because that’s all I’ve been feeling lately. I keep painting windows, but none of them look right without you in front of them.”
Her throat tightened. “Then why did you stop calling?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Because every time I did, I realized how much I missed you and I hated the person I was becoming without you near. I thought maybe if I buried myself in work, it’d hurt less.”
“Did it?”
“No,” he whispered. “It made it worse.”
For a long moment, they stood there two people who had once shared the same dream, now standing on opposite sides of it.
When the crowd thinned, he led her outside to the back alley, where the noise faded to rain.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” he said. “You’re living the stories we used to imagine.”
“And I’m proud of you,” she said. “You’re painting the skies we used to watch.”
He smiled sadly. “So why does it still hurt?”
“Because we grew,” she said softly. “And sometimes growing means changing shapes. Maybe the way we fit back then isn’t the way we fit now.”
Lance looked down, rain dripping from his hair. “Are we saying goodbye again?”
She shook her head. “No. Just learning how to hold each other differently.”
That night, before leaving Manila, Arielle visited their old café. She wrote a note on a napkin and left it under his cup.
Love doesn’t vanish when people change. It just finds new ways to stay.
I’ll keep writing our light, wherever we are.
Arielle
Back in her dorm, she opened her journal and wrote:
Maybe distance isn’t the enemy.
Maybe it’s just another canvas.
Because if love was real once, it leaves color behind.
She looked out her window the same kind of rain that once fell outside St. Claire.
And in the reflection, for a moment, she swore she could see him smiling back.
- Writer
