What if second chances come a second time?
Long ago, Hannah and Jonah called it quits. Long ago, Hannah stopped trying to make things work, and Jonah let her go. Long ago, Jonah mailed back all of Hannah's stuff from his apartment, and Hannah blocke...
The first thing I did after the short lunch with Jonah was unblock his phone number.
I know. That's so wild. I've had his number blocked after the night he finally confirmed that he was mailing my stuff back from his place in New York. There wasn't much that he sent back—a duffle bag full of change of clothes, a few books, a pair of shoes. Some other knick-knacks I left at his place whenever I visited.
I visited him in New York a couple of times while we were dating after graduation, flying in all the way from Los Angeles with what little savings I had. After a while, I couldn't afford another flight because I just couldn't save enough money. The cost of living alone was hard to keep up with, and that wasn't counting the amount of money I burned through trying to build up my portfolio. Booking gigs was hard—I still don't understand how my sister Leann made it sound so easy—and my clumsy ass keeps getting fired from all the part-time waitressing jobs.
Jonah and I broke up before he could ever get the chance to visit me in LA. He was always so busy. I remember he was having a hard time picking out his major, how he was so stressed out all the time. He never meant to take it out on me, but sometimes he'd get short with me. The time difference made it even harder, even if it didn't seem like much. He'd be too tired for a phone call when I finally got home from work. By the time I woke up in the morning, he'd already be in class, phone on silent. We'd only really get the weekends, but he would be working then, so I'd only get his lunch breaks.
We tried, we really did. We both knew that there'd be this distance, we talked it all out before graduation day. We made promises. We were so hopeful—maybe too hopeful that we'd make this work. We had no idea the kind of bone-aching exhaustion we'd get from trying to juggle school, work, and our relationship. We weren't prepared for it. It got out of our hands really fast, and before we knew it, we were yelling at each other on the phone and I was passed out on my bed, his number blocked, face swollen from crying all night long.
It was so easy then, back when we were still in high school. Before we got together, Jonah was the school loner, and I had the biggest crush on him. Big enough to conjure up a plan to try to get his attention, by purposefully making him hate me, because I believed there was a thin line between love and hate, and that he'd fall in love with me like it always happens in the movies. Enemies to lovers. You know how it is.
And it worked, kind of. One day at school, I bumped into him while holding a can of soda—much like how I did earlier at the campus, but on purpose. He was wearing a white shirt, and it got stained red from the soda. I pissed him off, and he dumped the rest of the can all over my hair. He finally noticed me for the first time then. Love at first sight, huh?
And then, there was a baby project. We got paired together, to jointly take care of a fake baby—a doll that cried when it needed to be "fed", when it needed a diaper change, when it got too cold. We had to get along then, to make the project work. Not only did we have to take care of a crying fake baby together, but we also had to pretend like we were a couple who were getting married. There were fake proposals. Fake weddings. There were even fake tax f we forms we needed to fill out together.
I made him fall in love with me then, like it was all so easy. Until one night, we discovered that he'd been there the night of the car accident, where I almost died and the reason my brother ran away from home. We both remembered things differently from that night—I remembered almost nothing, while he somehow assumed that he'd caused the accident. It turned out that he was just a witness who called 911 to help us, but he was so traumatized that he thought the accident was his fault.
We almost broke up over the misunderstanding, but after that, we were inseparable. He was my first serious boyfriend, and I was his first ever girlfriend. We'd get into small fights, but then I'd see him the next day at school and all the anger always melted away and we'd kiss and make up. We never really spent a day apart from each other.
I guess that was why the distance hit us so hard. We couldn't have imagined what it would feel like to be two thousand miles away from each other. We didn't anticipate how it would feel to only have a few short hours each week just to hear each other's voices. How, whenever we'd have a small fight, we couldn't just go knock on each other's doors and kiss all the worries away. I certainly didn't anticipate the loneliness without his presence.
Disagreements and arguments and all the quiet disappointments got packed up in boxes stored away for another day, until we ran out of space in the room, and everything finally burst into flames in that one last fight. We both said things we couldn't take back, and then it was over. Just like that.
I didn't think I'd ever see him again, not until today. All these months we've spent completely apart from each other had mellowed all the hurt I'd kept from that final night. And seeing his face today, the soft smile on his face, the way he looks at me, makes my ribs ache with longing.
When he hugged me goodbye after lunch, I knew that I never wanted to let go again. And I hoped he felt the same way. We didn't break up because we didn't want to be together anymore. We broke up because we wanted it so badly, we simply couldn't make it work. But maybe we have our second chance, now. Maybe we can try again. Maybe I can make it work this time.
I hope.
All these plans are already swirling inside my brain as I unblock his phone number, and send him the first text message since the day we broke up.
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Hannah: Hey, it's me. Hannah. In case you deleted my number 😋
