The Distance Love Couldn't Break

Chika Gladys NewAdult

They met in a foreign land that did not care where you came from—only how fast you could keep up.He was twenty-two, dressed in quiet luxury, the kind that never announced itself. His shoes were always clean, his accent polished, his future already mapped out by a family that owned more than most people dreamed of. Yet his eyes carried a loneliness money had never learned how to cure.She was twenty, carrying textbooks heavier than her savings. She worked late shifts, skipped meals without complaint, and smiled like someone who had made peace with hardship long before it learned her name. The world had never offered her softness—so she became it for herself.They did not fall in love at first sight.That would have been too easy.Instead, they noticed each other slowly.In the library.Always the same corner.Always silent.Samuel noticed how she read with urgency, as if time itself was expensive.She noticed how he stared out the window between pages, like someone searching for something he could not name.Some days, their elbows brushed.They never apologized.Some days, they arrived at the same time and left at the same time.Still, no words.Love began there—not in touch,but in awareness.Weeks passed. Then months.He started leaving his seat for her when she arrived late and exhausted.Evelyn began saving the seat beside her when she arrived first.Their conversations grew from nothing to everythingbooks, weather, childhoods they spoke about carefully, like fragile glass.He never mentioned the mansion back home.She never mentioned the hunger.But both of them felt the difference.Sometimes, he would look at her and think,If I reach for her, will I ruin her peace?Sometimes, she would look at him and think,If he knows how little I have, will he still look at me this way?So they waited.And waiting became their language.One evening, rain trapped them under the same bus stop. The city was loud, uncaring. She shivered in her thin jacket. He removed his coat without thinking and placed it on her shoulders.She froze.“No,” she whispered. “You’ll be cold.”“I already am,” he replied softly, not talking about the weather.That was the night she cried in her room, holding a coat that smelled like safety, wondering how something so simple could feel like being chosen.That was the night he lay awake, realizing love had finally found him—and it had chosen the most complicated form.Distance came soon after.His family wanted him back.Her tuition was due.Life reminded them that love does not cancel reality.They stood in the airport, not touching, not crying, just breathing the same air for the last time in a long while.“I don’t know when I’ll see you again,” she said, voice shaking.“I do,” he replied. “When the distance gets tired of failing.”She smiled through tears.So did he.They loved each other without promises,without rings,without certainty—only faith.And maybe that is the strongest kind of love.Because some distances exist to be measured—and some exist only to provethat love can cross them anyway.

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