Say It's Possible
Nicholas Katsaros had seen a lot during the thirty three years he had spent in the United States, but there was only one story he would make sure to tell his grandchildren and possible great grandchildren and actually anyone else who was willing to listen and deemed worthy enough. It was the story of the building across the street from his small greek family restaurant, on a nice little street in New York…
It was a Monday, when he first saw the two walking by on the other side of the street, a dark haired boy, and the other a blonde girl casually holding hands and talking.
He saw them from behind his counter and noticed that they were checking out the building on the other side of the intersection that had been up for sale for the last ten years. A rundown three-story house that used to be the salesroom of the adjoining shoe factory, which had been turned into a loft building several years prior.
The young man seemed more enthusiastic about the premises than his lady, but nonetheless they both crossed the street and came over to his restaurant.
"Hey," the boy said and gave him a wide smile, "I'm sorry, but can you tell me who I have to contact to buy the building across the street?"
That was the day he first met Wesley Holloway and Scarlett Young.
A few weeks later he watched the two of them begin renovating the whole building in order to turn it into an art gallery, Wesley's new place of work. He even helped them paint the outside walls and always made sure they had enough to eat and drink.
They were so in love with each other that sometimes just looking at them interact made him blush slightly, but they never noticed, neither his blush nor that he was watching them now and again; always too busy loving each other.
Even though he didn't realize it at the time, he saw them the night they broke up, a blissful year after they had bought the house.
It was late already and he was just about to close the restaurant for the day, when he heard loud voices coming from the building across the street. As always the door to the gallery stood open and through the big glass windows at the corner he could see Scarlett and Wesley fighting. That alone wasn't unusual; he had witnessed quite a few arguments between the two of them, but no matter how heated their argument was they never just turned around and left. They always fought out their differences and made up before the day was over.
Only this time– they didn't.
Scarlett stalked out of the building and towards her car with Wesley following closely behind, shouting at her to stop running away.
But Scarlett did and what either of them probably didn't know at that moment in time, was that she wouldn't come back the next day or the day after. Or the day after that.
The thing was: she wasn't going to come back. Period.
It took Wesley three weeks to realize that.
Eight weeks to accept it.
And nine weeks after Scarlett had left, the first letter appeared.
At first they were barely noticeable, a bunch of papers glued to the front of the otherwise normal building, and Nicholas had thought they were merely flyers someone had put up there until his daughter told him one day that they were love letters, all addressed to Scarlett.
That was just the beginning.
And for a year he watched silently as Wesley lived his life, never saying more than a few words to him, and religiously sticking a new letter to the outer wall of his gallery every single day.
On some days, he noticed, there were only a couple of words on a post-it, on others a few hundred written in tiny letters, but never more than one page, one post-it, in all the colors of the rainbow…
After a few months he noticed that other people had begun to put up their own love letters on the wall of the building. It wasn't new to him that people who walked by suddenly stopped to read the letters someone they didn't know had put on a wall in an unremarkable street, all addressed to S. He even knew that some of the residents of the street had made it a daily ritual to stop by the gallery to read the next chapter of a story they'd probably never fully understand. But strangers beginning to write their own stories? That was new.
He often saw Wesley sitting on the curb, staring up into the sky, a beer or wine bottle his only companion. To a passerby his expression could be mistaken as almost a look of serenity. Nicholas knew better. Missing your heart isn't something one can forget so easily no matter how much alcohol the boy drowns himself in.
Sometimes just looking at him made Nicholas all melancholy.
On those days he went home early and told his wife that he loved her before he went to sleep and he silently thanked God for letting him meet her and prayed for Wesley to find a way out of his misery.
Wesley stayed at the gallery most of the day, often late into the night, writing, reading or preparing the next exhibitions, sometimes talking to someone on the phone, or eating with a friend, though he only ever saw him with a short brunette or a guy with broad shoulders and a ridiculous Mohawk.
For some reason, Nicholas never really thought of his actions as romantic.
He watched him put up love letters everyday for several months and it never seemed like some grand gesture, a ritual maybe, but not a romantic sign. He figured it was therapeutic for him, an everyday thing, nothing special. But then again maybe that was what made it special, that he always did it, not just once to impress someone and rekindle a relationship. No, he did it every day, and probably more for himself than for the girl those letters were actually addressed to.
The reason he thought so was because he had met him and he knew Wesley Holloway good enough to know that he was not a very romantic person, really, actually he was everything but.
Nicholas's fifteen year old daughter sighed and turned towards him. "That's so heartbreaking and romantic at the same time... Do you think she'll ever come back?" She asked him and he didn't understand at first.
"Who?"
"Scarlett," Natalia replied, rolling her eyes (something, which Nicholas was sure of) she had picked up from Wesley.
He didn't know, but despite not really knowing either of those two very well he hoped that someday she would.
He didn't know their backstory, didn't know whether or not they grew up together, whether they met in high school, how long they'd been together before he first saw them that day, which felt like forever ago.
He didn't know why they broke up, whether it was over something stupid or with good reason, whether Wesley brought his misery upon himself, or if Scarlett had simply broken his heart, or even if someone else was foolish enough to come between the two.
He didn't know any of this, but he did know that he wanted Wesley to find happiness again, because he was one of those old men who wanted everyone to be happy in life. Everyone deserved to be happy in the end.
Natalia spent a lot of her free time over at the gallery with Wesley and sometimes went to see the exhibitions with her friends, though she mostly preferred to go alone.
Afterward she would always be hyped and go on and on about how great her night had been and how cool Wesley was.
Nicholas figured that a little crush on the boy across the street (who was so obviously still hung up on someone else) was better than an affair with a boy who drove a motorcycle and was ridden with tattoos, so he let her ramble on while she waited tables, and continued reading his paper in silence.
A few days before Christmas one year Wesley told him that he found a letter, taped to the entrance door of the gallery, from someone named Rose, who left her number telling him that he should forget about Scarlett and marry her instead.
He never called Rose, but the note did make him laugh and he painfully realized that he couldn't go on like this forever. That he probably couldn't spent another year like this, writing letters, wallowing in self-pity, pining after someone who had left him long ago.
It was just another Friday night, when Nicholas heard tires screech from a full braking on the street and for a second he thought that there had been an accident on the intersection in front of his restaurant. But when he looked up, he only saw one of those shiny black cars standing solely in the middle of the street.
His interest peaked; he watched a blonde woman with dark sunglasses get out of the car, leaving the door open, and walk towards the building across from his. Her body language told him that she was shocked, amazed and probably a little overwhelmed at what she saw in front of her.
"You're back for him, are you not?" He asked her once she had sat down at the bar half an hour later.
All Scarlett could do was nod.
"Eight hundred and ninety-six love letters have been written to you."
After almost three years Wesley had given up on waiting and had moved away, though he did keep the building and left the letters behind, clearly still not ready to completely let go of the love that had defined his life for so long.
Scarlett ordered a handful of shots and downed the first two within seconds.
Not quite ten months after Wesley had went away Scarlett had finally come back, but instead of finding the person she obviously still loved she found years of written love in the one place she was sure to see Wesley again, to find herself again.
It was already dark outside by the time Scarlett left the restaurant, more than a little buzzed, but not quite drunk.
She took a seat on the sidewalk at the corner and stared at the other building, still torn between being amazed and absolutely overwhelmed. The neon signs Wesley had put up a month before she went away were glowing in a bright red and Scarlett had a hard time trying not to cry.
"He left. But if you want you can rent the building, only condition is you leave it the way it is," Nicholas told her standing behind her. He had never been good at comforting people, but he thought she might like to know that she had the possibility to at least be close to Wesley in a way.
A month later she moved in with her design agency and four employees, none of them dare questioning her motives.
Nicholas often saw Scarlett sitting outside of the building, much the same way Wesley always had, staring at the wall and reading some of the letters.
At first just one at a time, and mostly those from people she didn't know. Then one day she began to read the ones addressed to her, sometimes spending long hours outside reading.
He helped her set up the ladder when she was done with the ones she could read while still standing on the ground. He didn't say anything to her about the letters, or her relationship with Wesley, but he did give her a warm smile before leaving her alone once again.
Sometimes she ate her lunch on the ladder, going through page after page, sometimes rereading a particular letter several times. Nicholas sometimes thinks he can see her pale green eyes brim with tears from across the street. Only sometimes.
In all the years that had passed since Wesley had put up the first letter Nicholas had never read any of them, for some reason he still considered them private, despite the fact that they were put on a wall in public, for everybody to see.
Maybe he was the romantic fool for thinking that only the people those letters were written to should read by them, but so be it.
On some days he saw Scarlett weep.
Tears of regret, of sadness.
Crying for a lost love.
Desperate because Wesley wasn't there. Wasn't where she had left him.
Not even Blaine, one of her employees and former classmates, and at the same time one of her best friends (who talked way too much in Nicholas's opinion) could bring comfort to her on those days. All he could do was hold her while she cried bitterly and hope that Wesley would come back someday.
Natalia got to know Scarlett like she did Wesley and for weeks she spoke of nothing but those two, how they were perfect for eachother, how she could not believe they didn't stay together, how they should get a second chance. Because the best love stories deserve a second chance.
Wesley was always a little embarrassed when people talked about it being such a romantic thing to do. But the truth was, he didn't do it to be romantic, he did it because he simply wasn't capable of not doing it.
He told Nicholas once that he knew what he was doing was stupid and senseless, but that he didn't regret doing it, because somehow his little gallery had become a place people associated with love, and that somehow had turned out to be on some level even better.
He knew that Steven McMillan, a private investigator who lived in the building right next to the restaurant, had been trying to track down Wesley to ask him to come back, to tell him that Scarlett was there, waiting, but even he couldn't find him.
All Steven found out was that he had left the country.
Scarlett was more talkative than Wesley, she could engage random people in conversations, found friends, she even moved into an apartment at the end of the block so that she could walk to work and always see Wesley's devotion to her.
But just like Wesley she always stayed alone, not once even thinking about someone else, about giving up for good. So each day she trudged on. Waiting. Always waiting.
The day Wesley came back wasn't anything special, it was cloudy and just warm enough to go outside in a t-shirt. Nicholas saw him slowly walk up to the building he still owned as far as he knew; he still looked the same. Tall, dark scraggly hair, sincere hazel eyes. A smile appeared on his face once he realized that the walls were still the way he had left them, a glowing declaration of love.
"Bye Nick," Scarlett called to him when she left his restaurant and though he will never admit it, he followed her outside, too curious to see what would happen to stay behind his counter.
He pretended to clean the windows while he kept eyes and ears on the two, who at this moment were still unaware of each other.
They both stopped dead in their tracks once they noticed one another and Nicholas was sure that all three of them were holding their breath at that very instant.
Once the shock wore off and he could see Wesley take a few steps closer to the person he had spent so many written words on, so many sleepless nights, so many dark days on.
He couldn't hear what was being said, but they didn't scream or cry, neither did they touch nor kiss. But that's not how things went with the lovers in those movies his wife loved to watch. Did these two learn nothing from Hollywood?
They talked for a few minutes and then Wesley went back the way he came and Scarlett walked the other way, neither one looking back.
Well, that was certainly not the big reconciliation he had expected after long years of suffering.
What he had just witnessed was actually rather disappointing, but then again who was he to judge?
Nicholas Katsaros might or might not have almost cried a little when he first saw them coming down the street hand in hand on a Tuesday several weeks later.
He stopped what he was doing and leaned on the counter, watching them like a thirteen year old girl watches the guy finally smooch the girl at the end of a romantic comedy.
And just like in the movies, Wesley dipped her and kissed his lover goodbye for the day, like Scarlett was his girl and he was a sailor about to leave her again for months instead of merely a few short hours.
With a beaming smile the blonde pushed her boyfriend (again at last hers) away after a few minutes and entered her office (ignoring the smirks her employees were sporting).
Waving at Kurt and winking one last time at Scarlett, Wesley then turned around and left, letting the girl get to work for a few hours before it was time to (finally) pick her up again.
Natalia was ecstatic when she found out they were together again and she swore to herself that she would never settle for a love less perfect than theirs.
Nicholas didn't think that their love was greater than any other kind of love, but that didn't mean it was any less special.
However he didn't dare tell that to his daughter, since he wouldn't mind her staying single till her early thirties or maybe even longer. Despite being a hopeless romantic, he was after all, still a father.
Just like they had those first few months after they had bought the building across the street, Wesley and Scarlett started to spend their lunch breaks together again. Every day at one they walked out of the office and got something to eat. Then they went to sit on the roof of their house, if the weather allowed it or stayed inside the restaurant, talking to Nicholas or Natalia and sometimes other people, depending on who was there, simply content to be together again, to catch up on all the time they had lost.
He smiled when one morning he got to his restaurant and saw the small poster in the window of the building he had spent so many hours looking at each day for all those many years.
"We're getting married" stood there in messy letters, black on white, nothing fancy, just a message. To let the people living on the street, the people who knew their story and had become their friends, know that they had finally gotten it right; that there was still hope for the rest of them, as Anastasia had put it. That second chances are meant to be.
He smiled to himself and went inside his restaurant, serving out free drinks to all the regulars and inhabitants of the street for the rest of day in celebration.
Over the next few days there appeared congratulation notes on the windows and for the first time in over five years even Nicholas himself wrote a few lines on a piece of paper and stuck it to the door.
The engagement party was held at the office and his restaurant and people wandered about, walking back and forth across the street. Everybody they knew (and a lot of people they didn't know) were happy for them. And Nicholas could honestly say that he hadn't seen that many people in his life being as happy and in love as they were that day.
Many of the attendees told them how they had fallen in love with Scarlett and Wesley's story; how they wished they were part of a modern day fairy-tale like theirs, but Nicholas wasn't one of them.
Unlike most of the people he hadn't forgotten that those years they didn't spend together were lonely and painful for the two of them and that they would probably gladly give up their romantic story if they could get back the time they lost in return.
And that was why-even though nobody died- Nicholas couldn't help but think of their story as a little tragic, because he would have hated to have lost just a single day with his wife, and they had lost years.
A few months and a wedding later Nicholas saw light on top of the office when he closed the restaurant and he could hear people talking and laughing on the roof.
On the last free wall stood, painted in big bold letters:
There are 1843 love letters on these walls and 2.984264786% of them are written by me for you. This will be the last and it contains just one significant question: Will you marry me, Maria?
Nicholas knew Maria, just like he knew anybody else living on the street. She was a high school math teacher who had moved into an apartment three floors above the restaurant just five months prior and had a perfect view of the building made of love.
He chuckled when heard Wesley complain about the whole thing being totally lame and such a cliché, to which Scarlett could only reply "Look who's talking!" (he had actually thought the same).
Smiling to himself he waved at the two of them when they noticed him and then continued his way home.
One day in May the following year they began to take the letters down. The weather and the time had left their traces and despite them being laminated some had suffered greatly.
They took them down with care, not wanting to destroy any and put each and every one of them in an album.
When Natalia found out that they still had them and even let people read them, she was out of the restaurant and her apron within seconds to sprinting across the busy street.
She spent every afternoon at Scarlett's office for weeks, probably reading each and every letter, even those she had already read years before.
She even wrote a paper about the building, the letters and the people for one of her college classes and got an A.
Just like Natalia, everybody in the neighborhood and regular customers of the restaurant knew the story of the building with the love letters and Scarlett and Wesley. People from elsewhere who had heard of it often asked Nicholas about them, about the letters, whether he really put them up on his own, only one at a time, every day for years, and if he knew why they took them down.
Some he told that they could take a look at how it used to be and read the letters in the office across the street, where Scarlett and Wesley showed them to everyone who wanted to see; some of them he told he didn't know much about it.
When one day much later letters started to appear again he couldn't help but smile to himself.
He saw Wesley and Scarlett standing on the sidewalk in front of their building, Wesley scratching his head, obviously contemplating what to do, and Scarlett standing next to him with her arms crossed and an amused smile on her lips. (Although he was fairly certain her gaze wasn't fixed on the newest edition of letters.)
The next day Wesley started repainting the wall, drawing a giant envelope on it, and put up a mailbox on the outside of the building. People from far away would start sending notes addressed to Letters to S. Jonathan, their mailman would always deliver them with a beaming smile.
They still kept the originals and people were always welcome to come in and read them or share their own stories.
Nicholas Katsaros still sees Wesley and Scarlett Holloway every day, working or talking, every so often kissing.
On the way home, always hand in hand, they wave at him, before walking those few hundred yards to their shared home, their personal happy-ending.
And for years to come, that he's sure of, the big neon letters on top of the building across from his restaurant will shine every night, reminding people of love and second chances.