The only thing in my life that ever resembled a love letter didn't come from my boyfriend of five years. It came from a young lady I barely knew.

The steam swirled thick inside the hot pot restaurant's private room, wrapping around the noisy chatters of a reunion that pulled together my junior high classmates and friends again. Some of them I had known since primary school.

Our social circles had overlapped for more than a decade. To everyone here, I was first an old acquaintance, a fixed figure of their long past. Not the person I was today.

The room was small, too small for around 30 people. My glasses fogged up as I looked down at my phone, and there, within the chat box, was a full big Word document sent by a young lady I never spoke to over all those years of shared social circles.

In the ecosystem of Chinese social media, sending a long, formal essay is actually often considered as clumsy, cringy, and a violation of the unspoken rule of effortless coolness. Yet, when others laughed at those funny “loving essays” on the internet, I often hid a desire within. I longed to be seen with that kind of weight.

And there she was. A girl who had watched me for maybe ten years. A young lady who knew exactly who I used to be. And now I was watching her excitedly digging up the ghost of me that I had buried.

Here is all I knew about her--a kindergarten classmate of my primary school friend. However, the only time I ever heard her name was in a messy love triangle: something about my friend, that friend's crush, and her. I never understood the details. And at the beginning of her confession, she wrote that she had always wanted to be friends with me but “knew she couldn’t.” The reason was that she believed she had hurt my friend back in middle school.

That was the ghost I knew of her. She had one of mine too.

Page after page, she praised parts of me I didn't even know existed, never described me as loud. She called it energetic.

But let's be honest. She didn't have to sit next to me in the fifth grade.

I was loud. I was too much. During that semester our school brought in a guest speaker to teach a class on storytelling. In every class he gave us random unconnected words and asked us to make up stories. When it was my turn, I stood and talked for the entire class period, 30 minutes, about a police officer who was in some way associated with Wukong, who was catching thieves.

The teacher couldn't get me off the stage. Or maybe he was enjoying his happy leisure. No one could. I was unstoppable. I was also, now I realize, absolutely insufferable.

Year after year, at small talks, old stories like that get retold. People would kindly tease me about my childhood self. Those playful jabs stung more than others realized. Tired of being forever defined by my silly younger self, I began to reinvent myself. One mistake at a time.

I viewed myself as a work in progress. I was in control, and it was more like shaping. I refused to see it as a cliché about “losing yourself”. I just despised the sight of my ambitious and formless self, so I subjected it to persistent suppression. I made sure that I was under control.

“This tomato pot is ready now,” someone called.

The room was too hot. Someone had wedged the door open, but the heat still clung to our faces like a second, uncomfortable skin. Every few minutes, one of us would glance at the door and whisper, “Shh, we're too loud,” especially because we were wearing the school uniforms. But we weren't genuinely worried about it.

My body sat among old friends, but my mind was miles away, lost in her words.

For people who have known you your entire life, familiarity doesn’t always bring closeness. On the contrary, overdue acquaintances often stop seeing you. They place you into a permanent box labeled “childhood friend” and never bother to look beyond that label. I existed in this crowd as a possible lifelong companion, not as an individual with new thoughts, new struggles, and a constantly changing mind.

Honestly, I do feel safe. I enjoy it as much as they do.

But before this reunion, I was breaking up with friends I had suddenly outgrown. It was during these clumsy breakups that I experienced the same terrifying sensation.

I remember one day, after I tried to insert my thought but was ignored again, that I realized those who couldn't hear me would never be able to, and I would deafen myself by shouting so loudly inside that I could no longer speak properly.

And that’s when I started to run away.

My way of breaking up was never brave confrontation. It was childish cold violence. I wouldn't allow myself to tell them that it was unkind to do so to me. I just said, “Sorry, I feel uncomfortable,” and then ran. I was afraid of being attacked back. Because I lacked both the will and the power to make counter-attacks. I escaped, and called it self-preservation.

And about this young lady, I knew nothing about her. Yet in her eyes, I was apparently someone worth analyzing.

At first, I felt uneasy. The kind of uneasiness when you realize someone's been keeping a file on you but you didn’t know. Probably it would include all your important failures, from being scolded until you cried to singing out of tune in front of the whole school.

I wasn't just living my life. I was a character in her private novel. She had built this whole version of me in her head. Surprisingly kind. And I never was.

That made me wonder: how many versions of “me” are there, floating around in other people's minds? Versions I will never see, never approve of, never even know about. And I have zero control over any of them.

But here's what I had to admit to myself--the stronger feeling was not unease. It was honor. I had never been treated with such great care and mixed but strong emotions.

We are not lesbians, and we certainly won't fall in love due to this event, but there was a genuine chance we could become friends. And I texted back:

“Don't overthink and make yourself sad. I feel we might be more comfortable if we spend more time together.

“I'll try to pull myself together too. Recently I haven't been acting like a qualified friend or a positive figure at all.”

I was sharing my clumsy actions without truly talking about it.

And she suddenly replied firmly:

“You are not that kind of person. Don't think of yourself that way. I believe in you.”

Crucially, she knew nothing of my recent collapses: the cold violence, the slammed doors, the friends I had severed.​ Her trust is blind. She knows nothing of the one who is too cowardly to confront anyone directly. She believes in a version of me that she built in her head.

But here is the difference: They see a cage. They see the loud, reckless one they have locked in the past. She sees something else. She sees the version I had to kill. And more than that--she sees the killing itself, and she didn’t walk away.

I personally suspect her motive was never about me. It was about her own growth.​ She used the image of me as a tool to navigate her own life. Through her words, I sensed her own past mistakes haunted her so painfully just like I did. We were both trapped by the past. She saw my cruelty to kill myself, and hoped I could forgive her past for her own past mistakes.

To be honest, I don't get her real intention.​ But in that steamy, loud room, her words cut through the noise. Whether she saw the real me or just the ghost she built to save herself, I am grateful for the sheer density of her emotion. I recognized that this unromantic and deep analysis between us was the only kind of love available to those of us who are our own hardest judges.

She wrote me a manifesto, and in return, I write this essay back to her, though she will never read it because​ I lack the courage she had.

Now, at nineteen, I understand the impact.​ The fact that I am sitting here, writing this, proves that I have metabolized her gaze. She wanted to use my image to grow, and instead, I used her document to build the person I am today. The document she built to save herself, and this essay I wrote to her, now exist in parallel.

There will always be some similar moment in life. There will be food, noise, common smiles. People will be laughing, and so will I. But now there will be a small quiet place that belongs only to me. That's where the letter lives.