The Boy and The Glass Bottle

Short Story

        Life has always been a routine for me. I wake up, study at school, go back home, sleep at night, and wake up the next morning to repeat the same process again. I am like a girl inside a jar rolling by the endless sea, always there under the bright blue sky, never seeing the beautiful shore, never getting out of the bottle.

        I grew up to be the girl who sees books and studies to be the only thing worth my time. I never had boys as love interest in my mind. For me, they are the ones that'll make a girl's mind completely uncertain and occupied. My girl friends always talk about boys and love as if it is their sole purpose in life, as if it is the very air that makes them breathe. I don't have anything against boys, really. In fact, I grew up surrounded by them, since I am the only girl in the family. I just don't see them as someone to love; I just see them as someone to be friends with. I wouldn't say that I haven't been curious about having a relationship with boys. I'll tell you, I did.

        Sometime in the past, a point in time wherein text mates are all but uncommon, I had this text mate, who somewhat fell in love with me. I wouldn't deny I also like him that time, but it's just that I knew it wouldn't work out. We never saw each other, we are miles away from each other, but I let it be anyway. Maybe it sounds harsh, but I just wanted to have an experience about the world outside the bottle. I do not know what love is, but I know when it isn't love. And what we had isn't. What we had is not real; it's just a figment of our imagination carefully placed there by the picture we made of each other. He was like a sea gull who took away my jar just as the wind took me out of his claws.

        After my not so significant encounter with the sea gull, I realized that my first assumption about relationships is true. It makes us lose focus of things that really matters. So I firmly decided that I will not let myself be carried away again; I will focus back on my studies. But I guess fate has something in store for me. Without me realizing, the winds of fate swept me to the least possible place I ought to be. It brought me to the shore.

        I live my life back to a normal pace, a routine. But then, I started going active with our church activities, and that's where I got to know the boy. The boy was always there at the shore, waiting for a bottle of heart from the sea. And I am a bottle of heart drifting through the waves, always at the sea. Both of us have been there ever since I found myself on the sea and he found himself at the shore. But we never realized that the breeze would connect us. He knew the winds will bring him what he's waiting for, even though he didn't know what it could be. I, on the other hand, never thought that I could ever meet the boy at the shore.

        The winds surely know what it was doing, because ever since the boy got the bottle at the shore, he never once let anything hurt it. He treated the bottle as if it is the most precious thing on earth. He loved the bottle and the heart inside it, no matter how imperfect and scratched the bottle might be. And once in her life, the heart in the bottle was so happy.