--- Chapter Three ---
I kept the bottle.
I did nothing dramatic.
I simply did not release it.
Not with excitement.
Not with romance.
Just with curiosity.
He had written about vibes
and energy —
about feeling something
from fragments of me.
I didn’t care much.
Not because it wasn’t sincere,
but because I was tired
of patterns.
Another Indian.
Another possibility.
My heart instinctively resisted.
After five days
of pretending it was nothing,
I reread the letter once.
Closed it.
It would have been easy
to release it back to the sea.
But one question refused to quiet down:
Will I regret this?
I didn’t ask if I liked
the way he wrote about
his thoughts and feelings.
I didn’t ask if this was fate.
Just — I asked myself:
Will there come a day
when I find myself wondering
what might have happened
if I had simply said hello?
Keeping it
was complicated.
Letting it go
would have been simple.
But something in the current
had already changed.
Some stories
rarely begin
with the simplest choice.
