The Note

Chapter One: Page 212

The note was tucked between pages 212 and 213 of a water-stained copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, purchased for two dollars from a charity shop in Brixton. Ananya found it on the train home—a small rectangle of lined paper, folded once, covered in handwriting so cramped and urgent it looked like someone had been writing against a deadline.

If you are reading this, I want you to know that it gets easier. Not better, necessarily, but easier. The weight does not disappear but you grow strong enough to carry it. I am writing this on the worst day of my life and I am putting it here because I need someone, someday, to know that I tried.

Ananya read it three times. Then she read it a fourth time, because by the third reading she was crying and had missed some of the words. She did not know who had written it. She did not know if they were alive. But she folded the note carefully back into the book, and when she got home she sat at her kitchen table and wrote a reply on the back, just in case someone found the book again: I found your note. You were right. It does get easier. Thank you for trying.