A Stellar Sayonara. @wanagracia - Tumblr Blog

THE SCAR THAT SAVED THE BEGINNING

On the morning after her wedding, Meera woke before the sun, her hands still stained faintly with henna, her hair smelling of jasmine and smoke from the sacred fire. The house was quiet in that fragile way new beginnings often are—full of promise, but not yet routine.

Three months later, she sat in a sterile white room while a doctor said the word cancer as if it were a foreign object he regretted handing her.

She was twenty-six. Newly married. Still learning the geography of her husband Arjun’s laughter, the rhythm of his footsteps in the hall. They were arguing about curtains and honeymoon destinations when the diagnosis arrived, uninvited and absolute.

The days that followed blurred into scans, second opinions, and the sharp scent of antiseptic. Meera watched her mother cry in the kitchen when she thought no one could see. Arjun stopped pretending to be brave and started being present. He held her hand through every appointment, his thumb tracing circles against her skin as if memorizing her pulse.

The surgery was scheduled quickly. “We caught it early,” the surgeon said. “We can take it out.”

Take it out. As if cancer were a splinter.

The night before the operation, Meera lay awake, staring at the ceiling fan turning slowly above her. She wasn’t afraid of scars. She was afraid of incompleteness—of being less than the bride she had just been, less than the woman she imagined herself to be. She worried about children, about intimacy, about becoming a burden in a marriage that had barely begun.

Arjun sensed the storm inside her.

“If this is our first test,” he whispered in the dark, “then we pass it together.”

The morning of the surgery, she felt strangely calm. The hospital gown replaced her silk saree; the bright bangles were traded for a plastic wristband with her name spelled slightly wrong. As they wheeled her toward the operating room, she caught one last glimpse of Arjun—eyes red, chin lifted stubbornly.

When she woke, the world was heavy and distant. Pain throbbed like a low drumbeat. But the first words she heard were, “It’s out. We removed it all.”

It’s out.

The relief was not loud or cinematic. It was quiet. It was tears sliding sideways into her ears. It was Arjun pressing his forehead to her hand and laughing in disbelief.

Recovery was slower than either of them expected. There were drains and stitches, weakness and waves of doubt. Some days she mourned the body she once had. She traced the new scar with trembling fingers, unsure whether to hate it or honor it.

But something unexpected began to grow in the place where fear once lived.

Gratitude.

Gratitude for early detection. For skilled hands. For a husband who learned how to braid her hair when she couldn’t lift her arms properly. For mornings when the pain was a little less than yesterday. For the fact that their story did not end before it had truly begun.

Meera realized that marriage was not just about shared celebrations. It was about shared vulnerability. It was about sitting on the bathroom floor at 2 a.m., laughing through tears because life had dared to test them so soon.

The scar healed into a pale line—a quiet reminder that something tried to claim her future and failed. She stopped seeing it as a mark of damage. It was proof of survival.

On their first anniversary, they didn’t throw a big party. They went to the beach at dawn. The sky bloomed pink and gold as the sun rose, steady and certain. Meera slipped her hand into Arjun’s.

“I used to think marriage meant building a perfect life,” she said softly.

“And now?” he asked.

“Now I think it means building a real one.”

The ocean answered with a patient roar. The sun climbed higher. And standing there—scarred, healed, and fiercely alive—Meera felt something stronger than fear, stronger even than relief.

She felt chosen by life itself.

Not because nothing bad had happened.

But because she was still here to live it.

What We Leave to Grow

Lila met June when they were seven, two girls with scraped knees and wild imaginations who built kingdoms out of cardboard boxes and swore eternal loyalty beneath the jacaranda tree in June’s backyard.

June was the sun, bright, unrelenting, warm in all directions. She loved easily and loudly, with a kind of certainty that made people feel safe in her orbit. Lila was quieter, always watching, always thinking. June made her laugh until her sides hurt, made her brave enough to speak in class, to try things she never would have dared alone.

They grew up tangled in each other’s lives, matching bracelets, inside jokes, nights spent whispering about dreams and heartbreaks. When they went to college, they chose the same city, renting a tiny apartment that smelled of cheap coffee and ambition.

But somewhere between the essays, the parties, and the endless talk of the future, Lila began to feel something she couldn’t name. June’s laughter, once a comfort, started to feel too loud. Her certainty too heavy. June always wanted to talk, to fix, to know everything. And Lila, without realizing it, began to crave silence.

She told herself it wasn’t June’s fault. June was just… June, radiant and sure. But Lila was changing, or maybe she was finally seeing herself outside of June’s shadow. And that new self-needed space, unobserved, unjudged, unanchored.

So one day, she simply stopped replying. No fight. No explanation. Just… absence.

She told herself it was mercy, that June would move on, find new friends, fill the silence with her own voice. And in time, June did stop calling.

Lila went on to build the life she thought she wanted. She became a writer, lived in small apartments with books stacked high against the walls, moved cities whenever the seasons began to feel too familiar. She had lovers, kind, complicated men who came and went, and friends who shared wine and laughter but never quite reached the depth she’d once had with June.

Years passed. Decades even. June’s name became a ghost she carried quietly, never spoken, but always felt.

One rainy evening, now in her forties, Lila found an old photo tucked in a book she hadn’t opened in years. Two girls, arms slung around each other, grinning with unfiltered joy. June had written on the back, “To forever, no matter what.”

Lila sat there for a long time, the photo trembling in her hand, her chest aching with something raw and unhealed.

She had grown, yes. She had learned how to be alone, how to live fully in her own skin. But the cost had been steep, not a lover’s betrayal or a failed dream, but the quiet heartbreak of losing the person who once knew her best.

And as she stared at their young faces, she wondered if growth was really about becoming someone new, or if it was learning how to love the people who helped you become yourself, without losing them along the way.

That night, she almost wrote June’s name into a message box. Almost. But after a few long breaths, she closed her phone and let the silence return.

Because the truth she’d come to understand was this: Some ghosts don’t haunt you because they’re gone. They haunt you because, once, you were the one who left.

The House Down the Street

She is a woman who had built her life with grit and purpose, stacked high with years of study, ambition, discipline, and quiet prayers whispered when the world wasn’t watching. Soon, she would be a wife too. Her wedding was just a month away. The invitations were out, the dress was chosen, and her fiancé, the man who adored her fully and consistently, was ready to begin forever by her side.

But just a few houses away, there lived a ghost from her past.

Not someone who had ever wronged her. Not someone she loved loudly. But someone whose name had lived quietly in her chest for fifteen years. A boy, who made himself known, the one who once asked her to prom when they were teenagers, when love was simpler and timing was everything. She turned him down back then, not out of cruelty, not out of disinterest, but because she was focused. She had dreams bigger than corsages and slow dances. She wanted more than the present could offer.

And so, he drifted. No bitterness, no drama, just an unfinished chapter. They grew up. He was off to a good career, his dreams in the palm of his hands. She became a woman with sharp edges and a soft heart. He got engaged. So did she. And still, the memory lingered, like the last sentence of a book that never got a sequel.

She never reached out. She never crossed any line, mere smiles whenever they meet eye to eye. But sometimes, when the world slowed down, she would think of him. Brief flashes. What ifs. Regrets that tasted more like curiosity than desire. She thought she had moved on, until dreams of him returned out of nowhere, just weeks before her wedding.

In one dream, they talked, just talked. But it was enough to wake her heart in that old, aching way. It was gentle but piercing. It made her question everything she'd worked so hard to bury.

It wasn't even about wanting him anymore. It was about what he represented: the path not taken. The version of her that once wondered what might have bloomed if she'd chosen differently. That ache wasn’t really about him. It was about the shadow of something unresolved.

She told him once, not long ago, that she had liked him all those years ago. He was taken aback, dumbfounded for a second, confusion evident in his face. She though it was through, then a mutual friend casually mentions that he, in a drunken moment, told people she was his biggest regret. That stung. Because even though she’d made peace with her choices, it was still hard to hear that someone she once quietly loved had felt the same, but too late.

Still, she chose her fiancé. Not because the other option didn’t exist, but because she knew what real love looked like. And it was him, the man who stayed. The man who knew about her past, who even laughed sometimes when they ran into the man down the street. The man who never flinched, never doubted her loyalty, never withheld love.

But she carried guilt, not for what she had done, because she had done nothing wrong, but for what she still felt. The emotions she couldn’t control. And because she was a woman of faith, she feared that even her private longings were sins. That maybe Jesus wouldn’t be proud of the cracks in her heart. That maybe this made her unworthy of the vow she was preparing to make.

But maybe this is what it means to be human: to have feelings that don’t always obey, and still choose faithfulness anyway. To carry memories and still walk forward. To love with intention, not just emotion.

So one evening, when everything was quiet, she wrote a letter she would never send. To him. To herself. To the past. She poured every piece of that 15-year ache onto the page. She thanked him for the lessons, for the mystery, even for the heartbreak he never knew he gave her. And then she let it go.

She prayed. Not for answers, but for release. She cried, not because she wanted him back, but because she was finally ready to stop letting his memory live rent-free in her spirit. She stood in front of her reflection and whispered, “I choose this life. I choose this love. I choose peace.”

After that, she still saw him sometimes. He still lived just a few houses down. But the ache was quieter. The air between them no longer felt heavy with unsaid things. She had given it a name. And she had buried it.

Her heart wasn’t broken anymore. It had simply grown. Made room for grief, and then for grace. And as her wedding day approached, she stepped forward, not as a woman hiding from her past, but as someone who had made peace with it.

Because that’s what real love is.

A choice made in the presence of all possibilities.

And choosing the one who chose her back, every single day.

fivendandelions

LILO & STITCH (2002) — dr. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

tvandfilm

A WALK TO REMEMBER (2002) Dir. Adam Shankman

After eight years together, I thought I’d seen all the ways my boyfriend could show his love. But today, out of the blue, he surprised me with a beautiful bouquet, no special occasion, no reason other than “just because.”

He handed me the colorful bundle of flowers with that familiar, soft smile. As I inhaled the sweet scent, my heart swelled with warmth. It wasn’t about the bouquet itself, it was the message behind it. A simple, thoughtful reminder that I’m on his mind, that I’m loved even in the quiet, everyday moments.

Holding those vibrant flowers, I felt incredibly lucky. Eight years of shared memories, laughter, and growth, and he still finds new ways to make me feel cherished. That unexpected bouquet made an ordinary day feel magical. It was love, pure and unspoken, blossoming right there in my hands.

“The Painter Who Waited”

For most of his life, Elias thought time was something you could borrow against.

He worked hard, harder than anyone he knew, trading his twenties for rent, his thirties for promotions, and his forties for a house with more rooms than visitors. He learned how to live smart: how to budget, how to save, how to fix a leaking faucet, how to survive. He thought life would reward him for being practical. And in a way, it did.

By sixty-five, Elias had stability. He had a paid-off home, a modest retirement fund, a pantry full of everything except joy. He also had time, more than he’d ever had before, and no idea what to do with it.

He lived alone in a house that echoed, a place that looked expensive but felt empty. He wasn’t unhappy, but neither was he truly living. Each morning, he made the same coffee in the same mug and stared out at the same tree in the backyard, which seemed to change more than he ever had.

One evening, while digging through a closet for an old photo album, Elias found a small wooden box. Inside were brittle sketchbooks from his youth, pages filled with untrained, ambitious lines, eyes too large, hands too stiff. But they were his. He touched them as though they might crumble.

Beneath the sketches was a note he had written in his own handwriting, barely legible:

“When things settle down. When life makes space. Then I’ll learn how to paint.”

He stared at the note for a long time.

The next day, he bought a canvas. And then another. And then a whole set of brushes, paints, and turpentine that smelled like something real, something that stained fingers and made the air feel alive.

He didn’t tell anyone. There wasn’t really anyone to tell. But in the solitude of his kitchen-turned-studio, Elias began to paint.

His hands shook sometimes. His colors bled. His skies looked more like bruises than sunsets. But it didn’t matter. He was finally speaking in a language he had locked away for decades, and it came back to him in stutters and bursts; messy, imperfect, honest.

He painted memories: the face of a woman he once loved but didn’t follow. The alley behind his childhood home. The view from the construction site he used to work at, where he would pause to watch the sunrise before the hammering began.

And as the paintings stacked up, so did something else, something he hadn’t felt in years. Not pride exactly. Not purpose. But presence.

Elias had spent a lifetime gaining everything he thought he needed. Now, surrounded by the scent of linseed oil and the scratch of brush against canvas, he understood what he had really been: poor. Poor in soul, in expression. Starved for meaning.

He often laughed to himself at the irony of it. All those years chasing security, only to realize security was never the same as living. He had waited until his hands ached and his knees betrayed him, just to begin.

But he had begun.

Some evenings, he would look at his latest canvas, still drying under the dull hum of a desk lamp, and whisper:

“At last.”

And though he knew his work might never hang in a gallery, or be admired by anyone beyond the postman who sometimes lingered too long at the open window, Elias no longer cared. He had made something. He had left behind something more than savings.

He had color. He had voice.

And he had finally come home to himself.

“What He Never Said”

He met her in his second year of college, not at some party, not through friends, but in the quiet corner of the campus library where she always sat, her headphones in, furiously typing like the world might end if she paused. He noticed her before she noticed him. It didn’t take long.

Their friendship started with sarcasm and shared caffeine addiction. It grew with late-night ramen runs, study sessions that turned into movie marathons, and conversations that bled into sunrise. She was sharp, warm, complicated, and completely unaware of how easily she became the center of his universe.

He had front-row seats to her life. He knew every version of her, the one who overthought everything, the one who danced around her apartment barefoot, the one who gave more than she ever asked for. And somewhere along the way, quietly, inconveniently, he fell in love with her.

She, of course, fell in love with someone else.

He was there for that too, the first date, the giddy phone calls, the fight they had junior year that nearly ended it. And later, the ring. She called him first when it happened, her voice shaking with happiness. He swallowed the lump in his throat and told her what she needed to hear.

“I’m so happy for you.”

And he meant it. Mostly.

He never told her. Never hinted. He figured if she didn’t know by now, it was better that way. Their friendship was too good, too rare. He wouldn’t taint it with timing that had already come and gone.

The night before her wedding, he wrote a letter.

Three pages. Honest. Raw. Not to change anything, just to say it, somewhere. To honor the quiet truth he had carried all these years.

He tucked the letter into his jacket pocket and brought it with him to the ceremony. Just in case.

She looked beautiful. Not in the overused, bridal-magazine way, but in the way people look when they are completely sure of something. She was radiant, and happy, and exactly where she was meant to be. And as he stood among the guests, watching her vow forever to someone else, he felt two things at once:

Heartbreak, and peace.

After the ceremony, when everyone was drinking and dancing and toasting to love, he stepped outside alone. The sun was setting, the kind of sunset people write songs about.

He pulled the letter from his jacket, ran his fingers over the folded paper. Then slowly, quietly, he tore it in half. And again. Until the words he never said were nothing but scraps.

He didn’t need her to know.

She had found the kind of love she deserved.

And he, he would carry his in silence, where it had always been safe.

Love, he realized, isn’t always about the ending. Sometimes, it’s about the not saying. The staying. The letting go.

And that, in its own quiet way, was enough.

At the ripe old age of 30, I walked into my first art class hoping to awaken my inner Picasso, but instead I discovered that my classmates—Sam and David—shared names with the fictional duo I was obsessed with in high school: All-American Girl by Meg Cabot. Teenage me would’ve screamed, swooned, and probably started sketching hearts in the margins. Adult me just nodded coolly and said, “Nice to meet you,” while internally wondering if the universe was trolling me or just giving me fanfiction-level déjà vu.

piney-45

"There's a Korean word my grandma taught me. It's called jung. It's the connection between two people that can't be severed, even when love turns to hate. You still have these old feelings for them; you can't ever completely shake them loose of you; you will always have tenderness in your heart for them." - Lara Jean (P.S. I Still Love You, Jenny Han)

wanagracia

iglovequotes

A milestone.

I remember it was winter, a few months after I passed the bar. It was a chilly night, -8 degrees celsius, and I can see smoke coming from my breath while I was holding a sausage from Nice 2cu on one hand and the other with a pipping hot taiyaki in front of my hotel. It was my first trip in South Korea where I paid everything for myself, no gift money, allowance and or sponsors from my family.

I remember looking up for a few seconds in the dim night sky and saying in my head, “I made it.”

Closed a chapter, and stepped on to the new one.

I suddenly lost interest in Taylor and her songs.

what-iz-life

Your soul knows. It will literally tell you when it's time to start a new chapter of your life. Trust it.

what-iz-life

i’m starting to learn that i don't have to react to everything that bothers me, sometimes i just need to breathe, let it go, and keep my peace.

jaennie

dreamgirl

As someone who has been into business for more than a decade, I have met, acquainted, and befriended a lot of clients and customers that I had the opportunity to serve.

We would often talk about the weather, their pets, their kids, their hobbies and basically anything under the sun that could fit into the mood while they wait on things that they are buying or bills they are paying for.

For me, it has always been nice getting to know people, even though the conversation mainly revolves on superficial topics and random subjects.

I love my job for it humbled me, and how it made me treat people the same respect regardless of how much money they have or education they finished.

The only thing I do not like, is when a good customer of mine passes away.

The grief of knowing that you would never be able to talk to them, ask them about the plants they were growing, or send regards to their grandkids that you have grown to be fond of, or at least tell them your good bye, often times render me speechless. It is a different kind of grief, to loose a customer, especially those who had been your regular customers for years. You are not family, nor close friends, but an aching tug in you heart proves that those moments are important for you and that they hold those memories dear in your heart.

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