Fleeting Memories

• Joella Kwan , Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2022

It has been said that time heals all wounds. But that isn’t true. The wounds remain. Over time, in order to protect its sanity, the mind buries it. Deep down where it will never be found again. People say to move on and grow. And many have. Yet here I am. Suffocating in a perpetual loop of pain. Reliving the moments where I still had you.

And I know I should move on. I know that I have to let go. But I am scared of losing you. And I cannot let go of the pain I feel because it is the only thing left connecting me to you. The world constantly changes, and we will never get back the lost time. All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best thing we can do is to start over and move on. Because what is meant for us will stay. Right?
But I still think about you. Because it has and always will be you.

How can I stop thinking about you when everything reminds me of you? The autumn leaves remind me of you as you lay in them without a care in the world. The ocean reminds me of your eyes. The same eyes that looked at me with so much pain and despair.

I swore that I would always protect the one thing I am unable to live without. You. For without you I would be another lost soul. Yet I could only love you as forbidden things are loved. In secret. In between the shadows and the soul. And when the day came where I had to let you go, I lost myself.

There was a time when I would have left everyone for you. And in a way I did. Yet in a cruel twist of irony, you were the one who left me. And then I was left with nothing. Nothing but broken promises and fading memories. And inside me it feels like every cell had deflated; wilted cells like dead petals falling from a flower. Once full of life.

I realise now that I have to live the rest of my life in the darkness that you saved me from. You were the one who saved me from the dark. It is almost poetic that your death should be the one that makes me return to it.

People say that love is the strongest kind of affection someone can have towards another. Yet those four letters could never come close to conveying how much you meant to me. My very being started and ended with you. But you were my fleeting lover. The one who got away.



The letter sits in its non-descript box. The wood peeling off and the paint long faded. A letter that contained so much yet was reduced to so little. A commemoration of their love that could never be.