I Swear You Will Be Fine

Dear Josh,

I’ve been feeling terrible, as you know, but that helps with writing these letters. The previous one was longer than expected, so I’ll try to keep this one short. I’ve been trying to give myself therapy and speak to myself the way I’d speak to others. The former is likely a bad idea, but it’ll have to do for now. The only good thing about being alone a lot is that I live in my head a lot. It provides space and time for reflection, which is something I’ve been doing much more than I used to. One thing I’ve noticed is how I sometimes engage in binary thinking, or in other terms, I think like a four-year-old and assume my current emotion is how I’ll be for the rest of my life. For example, sometimes I think “I will always be miserable and never happy.” It’s very binary, like there are only two options in life – always happy or always unhappy and I’m likely always unhappy. I say that it’s a four-year-old mindset because that’s often how kids are, and I think I’m acting like one when I think like that. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be unrealistic.

In reality, as much as I might disagree in a bad moment, there will be good and bad times. It’s all very much dependent on one’s perspective. I saw this line recently about having smile lines on one’s face. The perspective I’ve been taking lately is seeing the joys of others’ sorrows. The one about smile lines made me think “What a fulfilled and happy life one must have had to have smile lines on one’s face. They must have smiled and laughed a lot. How nice it is to have permanent markings on one’s face to symbolize the existence of joy.” I wonder if I’ll be lucky enough to have smile lines in the future. I say this now, but when I start having wrinkles that are visible even when I rest my face, I’ll probably scream internally.

Like we’ve written about, grief often causes happy moments to be laced with sadness. Sometimes sadness takes over the happy moment and it is hard to find the happy again. I’m in the middle of one of those moments where sadness makes happiness difficult to find. It’ll take time and I’m sure I’ll find the happy moments again, but at the moment, it’s difficult. This entire paragraph feels like it could be a tongue twister. Do you remember when we stayed up to 4am on video call rapping nursery rhymes and tongue twisters? It was very early on in our relationship and we laughed so hard my abdomen started hurting. You had to muffle your laughter so that you wouldn’t wake your mum up, and you said you weren’t tired at all and only ended the call because your mum would be up soon and get upset at you for staying up the whole night (sorry Auntie, that was the only time we did that!).

In 2024, we took a timelapse video of us opening a blind box. In 2025, I found a way to slow the timelapse down, so a 30-second timelapse video of us became a near 5-minute video in moving pictures. I watched it last night, and managed to find moments to screenshot. I’ve miraculously produced more pictures of us that I didn’t have before! My first instinct was to send these pictures to your mum and sister, forgetting that it was past 12am (sorry! You would have gently told me off for sending so many texts in the night!). I hope the new pictures are at least a nice message to wake up to though. The pictures make me happy to look at because it reminds me of a happy time. I’m so glad we have pictures of our love. I’ll show you what I mean:

I can’t wait to see you again. I love you more, always, and forever.

Love always,
Sha