Seven Years of Us, One Year of Me Chapter 07

Seven Years of Us, One Year of Me Chapter 07

After the breakup, I went south.

Not to the city where he had changed his grad school choice.

Another city.

There was an ocean there, and winter wasn’t cold.

I went alone.

I found a job there, an ordinary job.

The apartment I rented had a small balcony where I could see a little bit of the ocean.

I planted a pot of lisianthus.

It hadn’t bloomed yet.

My days suddenly became quiet.

When I was with him, I had always been busy.

Busy replying to his messages, busy waiting for his calls, busy making excuses for him whenever

he forgot a promise.

After seven years, I had almost forgotten what quiet felt like.

The first month was the hardest.

When I woke up in the morning, I habitually checked my phone.

There were no messages from him.

Only then did I remember we had broken up.

When I passed a basketball court, I would freeze for a second.

When I drank milk tea, I would instinctively say thirty percent sugar, then remember no one would

buy it wrong anymore.

One weekend, I went to the beach by myself.

There were children building sandcastles on the shore.

A wave came in and knocked half of one down. The child crouched and started rebuilding it.

I watched for a long time.

I thought of senior year of high school, when I had built myself up piece by piece.

Built myself into someone who could get into Princeton.

Built myself into the girlfriend he liked.

Built myself into someone who didn’t care about Madeline Hayes.

Then a wave came in, and everything collapsed.

I didn’t rebuild.

I sat on the beach and didn’t want to build anything anymore.

Later, I started a social media account.

I called it The Seventh Year.

The first post was about graduation day.

It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t a complaint.

I just wrote it down.

I wrote about the sunflowers on the field.

The star necklace I took off.

The moment I looked back when I walked out of the school gate.

After I posted it, it got a few hundred views.

The second post was about senior year of high school.

He had ridden his bike to take me home, the wind was fierce in the back seat, and he told me to put

my hands in his jacket pockets.

The third post was about sophomore year of college.

The first time I heard the name Madeline.

I had been doing homework at the time, and I responded casually, not taking it seriously.

Only later did I realize that had been the moment I should have taken seriously.

The views went from a few hundred to a few thousand.

The third post was recommended on the platform.

Someone commented, “I had an Adrian West too. I waited six years too.”

Someone said, “I cried when I read the part about the sunflowers.”

Someone said, “Thank you for saying it. I still don’t have the courage.”

I read them one by one.

So I wasn’t alone.

So many people were waiting for someone they could never reach.

In the fall, the lisianthus bloomed.

Pale purple.

Tiny flowers.

I took a photo and posted it on my account.

The caption read: The seventh year is over. The first year has begun.

That post got more views than all the previous ones.

The top comment said: Girl, we’ll be with you through your first year.

I stared at the screen.

My eyes went wet.

Not because I was sad.

Because I finally felt like I was no longer standing in place, waiting for him.

I had moved forward.