I loved her for nine years without saying it.
We sat together in school, walked home together and shared the same small dreams. When she cried over her father's death, I held her bag and said nothing because I did not know which words were safe.
Then she got a scholarship abroad. The night before she left, she stood at my gate with her suitcase and said, "Is there anything you want to tell me?"
My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
She waited. Then she smiled sadly, the way you smile at a door that will not open, and walked away.
I wrote her a letter that night. Four pages. Every year, every moment, every word I had swallowed. I posted it the next morning.
She never replied.
Six years passed. One evening, I saw her at a bus stop, older now, a little tired. I froze. She turned, saw me, and her face did something I did not expect. It broke.
"I never got your letter," she said, before I could speak. "My aunty told me years later she had thrown it away. She thought I should focus on my studies."
I could not breathe. "It was four pages."
"Tell me what it said."
So I told her. Standing at a noisy bus stop with strangers pushing past, I said all four pages from memory. By the end, she was crying and I was too.
"I waited for you to say it that night," she said.
"I know. I am saying it now."
She took my hand, and this time nobody threw anything away.