Time moved—as it always does—quietly, without apology.
Seasons slipped past like pages in a book Cean had once loved but no longer reread. The hum of life in Kabacan carried on: tricycles sputtering down narrow streets, professors with too much coffee in hand, and students clutching their ambitions like shields against the heat.
By the start of a new semester, Cean was in her second year of Political Science. Her days were now a carousel of student council meetings, half-finished coffee cups, and late-night debates over institutional collapse and moral theory. She argued fiercely, not just to be heard, but to understand where she stood in a world so loud with injustice. There were moments she would catch herself mid-sentence—animated, eyes gleaming—and think, I never thought I'd be this version of me.
She was stronger now. Not harder, not colder—but more rooted, like a tree that had once been tossed by storms but had learned to anchor itself, even in brittle soil.
She no longer wrote sad poetry at 2 a.m. She didn't need metaphors to survive anymore. Instead, she drafted proposals for youth campaigns, crafted budgets with tight margins, and gave impassioned speeches about access to education and mental health awareness. Her notebook was no longer a confessional—it was a roadmap.
But even so, some nights held a quieter kind of gravity.
When the town stilled and the sky turned the color of bruised lavender, Cean would sit by her window in her tiny apartment near campus, knees drawn to her chest, and glance at the blue notebook resting on her shelf—the one Yuan had sent her, long ago.
She never opened it. She didn't have to.
Just seeing it was enough to stir a soft ache in her chest, like the faint echo of an old song. I wonder if he still writes, she'd think. I wonder if he's changed. Or if he's still that boy with the quiet heart and eyes full of red skies…
She never said his name out loud anymore. But in the silence, it still echoed.
-
Yuan, now deep into his Engineering journey at UM, was thriving in his own quiet way.
It wasn't flashy. He didn't collect medals or lead rallies. But his growth was steady—like the slow, sure spread of sunlight at dawn.
He led group projects with unexpected ease, his once-soft voice now filled with quiet command. He fixed things—broken printers, lab equipment, cracked circuits, and, slowly, himself. There was a calmness to his presence now, a sense of knowing who he was becoming, even if he didn't have all the answers yet.
Yuan still wrote—only now, it wasn't for someone else. It wasn't love letters sealed with trembling hope or late-night poetry sent across screens. It was bits of himself scrawled in the margins of lecture notes, in the backs of math handouts, on crumpled napkins during study breaks.
It was for him.
And he was learning to be proud of that.
Neo, ever the provocateur, would nudge him during lunch and ask with a smirk, "Still hung up on that girl with the blue and black obsessions?"
Yuan would only grin, not bothered like before.
"She wasn't an obsession," he'd reply, tapping his pen against the table thoughtfully. "She was a mirror."
Neo would blink. "A mirror?"
"Yeah." Yuan's voice would soften, like a secret uncoiling. "She showed me everything I was... and everything I wasn't ready to be."
There was no bitterness in his voice. Just quiet truth.
And sometimes, when the stars blinked awake over the UM campus, Yuan would tilt his head back and close his eyes, wondering—just briefly—if she still watched the skies, too.
'_'