Letter Three – The Strange Safety
I wish my English had been better back then, in that summer month when we first met. Maybe I could have spoken more, expressed myself more clearly.
Or maybe not. Maybe everything happened exactly the way it was meant to, arranged by the universe—just like how we met.There's one thing I've always wanted to thank you for:
You complimented my body.
Not in the way some men do—offering compliments just to sound nice, or handing them out like favors, as if they were doing women a kindness from some higher place. No. Yours was different. It was honest. Real.
I suppose that was one thing consistent about you: your honesty, even when the truth wasn't pretty.
Why did you open up parts of yourself to me? Why did I open up parts of myself to you? We saw something secret in each other—and yet, neither of us walked away.
I know I couldn't do that now. I'm tired. As an adult, I have to think carefully before I speak—measure every word, in case it circles back to me in the form of rumor or gossip.
And then I realized—that was why.
Because we had nothing to do with each other in our "real lives."
And in that strange safety, we could reveal something true.
No consequences. Just two people, being seen.
Look at me—I got carried away.
Let me circle back to why I wanted to thank you.
You complimented my body—and my looks, though not always directly.
Before I met you, I'd had some unhealthy relationships.
One thing they all had in common: the men I dated shamed me for my body. Especially my lower abdomen. It was relatively larger—or at least, larger by the social standards in my country. And I got criticized for it.
I can't tell you how shocked I was that day when you held my lower abdomen and said,
“Don't lose this. Maybe you don't know how good this is now, but never lose this.”
You might not even remember that moment. But to me—it was huge.
It changed how I gave myself credit. How I looked at myself.
How could that be? I wondered.
This was the exact same body. The same person—me. And yet, one person saw only flaws, and another—somehow—saw beauty.
Some people might say,
“Oh, men say things like that to get their way.”
But I knew. I know that wasn't a line. That was sincerity.
Note: This is a work of pure fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
