When I was sixteen, I received a letter: “When you grow up, I’ll come marry you.”
I hid the letter in an iron box and kept it hidden for ten years.
At twenty-six, I started a new job. My boss was the man I’d had a crush on for ten years.
He didn’t remember me.
No, he did remember.
He remembered that I liked my milk tea with thirty percent sugar, that I was afraid of the dark and wouldn’t walk alone at night, and that my stomach hurt during my period.
But he never told me he liked me.
Until the day I found that iron box in his office.
Inside were all the letters I’d written to him over the past ten years. Not one of them had ever been sent.
The last one was written on the day I started my job: “Gu Chen, at last, I can stand in front of you without hiding.”
Beneath it was a line in his handwriting:
“So can I.”
