I didn't tell anyone I was leaving.
I suppose I took a page out of your book, Ging, by doing that. Abandoning people was always your forte and not mine.
No, instead, my secret talent, my party trick, was falling hopelessly in love with men who will never settle down.
But that's beside the point.
For a while, after you left, I tried to move on. I threw myself into my responsibilities within the village and resolutely tried not to think of you. I learned a lot of things in those years. I learned to bake, I learned how to sew (yes, that's right, you drove me to fucking sewing), I learned hunting and healing techniques form the elders and I also learned how to bottle up and lock away my emotions like a fucking champion.
I also got engaged.
Surprisingly, it wasn't arranged and I think given more time I could have grown to truly love the boyish warrior named Makoa, but of course, inevitably, inexplicably, you got in the way.
Even when we're not on the same continent, you still find a way to fuck me over.
11 days before my wedding and almost ten years after being dumped by the boy who smelt like fish and dirt, did I find your note.
Yes, that damned fucking note that threw what might've been a calm and nice life for me out the window.
I don't know if you remember, what you left for me in the summer a decade ago, nailed underneath the wood of my underwear drawer (which, by the way, I explicitly told you to never open and am still pissed about).
It was a note of few words, just like the author.
"See Kaito," it said with some coordinates written in some chicken scratch handwriting. But that could be anyone's chicken scratch handwriting, I told myself at the time, even though I knew.
What sealed my fate was what was written on the back.
"Ging," it said in barely legible letters.
"Ging," it said, taunting me with four simple characters.
"Ging," it said, and with it brought a myriad of memories from my past, of a bitter childhood crush that was so much more than that.
I crumbled the paper in my hands and genuinely considered setting myself on fire to express the utter rage I was feeling at that moment.
Because it's never enough, is it, Ging?
It wasn't enough to just abandon me, so you had to leave a note you knew I wouldn't find until years later, and dangle yourself in front of me like a carrot to a pig.
It was stupid, and I knew it, but god damnit I was a foolish pig.
I left the island that night without telling anyone, not my mother, my father, or even my betrothed Makoa.
Oink, Oink.
Fuck you, Ging