“The secret of my Heart”, Daryna Gulei [best novels in english txt] 📗

One summer day I was surfing the internet for a website that offered free English books, and thank God I found it. The books were a good opportunity for me to practice my English reading skills, and I was so excited to read them all. There were about one thousand short stories about people’s lives, friendships, true loves and relationships between parents and children. I read thirty of them, and they all had plaintive and minor endings. That makes me too sensitive and causes me to think back on the past years. I remembered my childhood, those beautiful moments of my life, and motivated myself to write this story. I have never decided to write any books in my life, but this story is special for me. This is a true-life story, which is based on real events. I kept it in my heart more than three years, and I can`t hide it anymore.

I am now twenty-one years old, but my story begins when I was about seven or eight. One day I was on my way to school, which was on the other side of the road from my house. It was only a twenty meter walk to school. I was lucky, wasn’t I? So, I was walking to school when suddenly I heard foot steps behind me. I looked back and saw a cute, blond-haired boy with blue-grey eyes. He had an athletic body and beautiful smile. I quickly turned back away from him and continued my walk. There were no greetings from me and nothing from him. We both were concentrating on reaching our destination. At school I found out that he was in an upper class, so he was older than me by one year. After one month of study period, I learned that this boy was not only a pupil from the same school, but also my neighbor from an upper floor in my building!  During the next several months we left our homes every morning at the same time and walked to school together without any talking or any kind of greeting. We were too shy to speak with each other. It was boring for me, and one day I decided to say “hello” to him. Finally, we met each other. His name was Kolya. His full name was Nickolay.

Time passed so quickly that we didn`t even understand that we had become best friends. Now, I can definitely say that, yes, he was my best friend. We walked together to school. We started talking with each other a lot, discussing everything about this exciting world, our friends, our school, trendy toys and our life events. He liked football and table tennis. He was a very athletic boy; I thought he would will build a football career for himself in the future, because he was truly the best player in our school. He taught me how to play table tennis and it became a tradition to play tennis after school lessons. One day he invited me to his flat and I met his parents. He was the only child in the family and lived with his mom, stepfather, granddad and grandmom. He had a big family without any pets. Kolya liked to play video games. He usually invited me to play with him. We also spent a lot of time outside playing football. Yes, I also like to play football, and I played better than other girls of my age. He liked to play with toy guns and ride a bicycle in the local park. I still remember how Kolya, his family, and I used to ride bicycles during on summer days. Those were joyful days of our childhoods. I didn`t appreciate our friendship at that time; I think he did the same. We were children with no cares about our lives.

Then we grew up and became just neighbors from different stories of our building. He still looked beautiful. He still played sports, even more than he did in his childhood. He met new friends, and had a couple of girlfriends. He didn`t speak to me as much as he had in past years. Finally, he graduated school and looked like a real man with lots of ambitions and goals for the future. I still had one year left until I graduated. I started to think how sad and boring school would be without his company. The summer days started, and my mom decided to have a vacation in Bulgaria, and to take me with her. I like the Bulgarian sea, the beach, people and nature. I swam, ate local traditional dishes, and played sports – everything to feel a bit of rest after some hard school days.

One day, while we were resting in the hotel room, one of my school friends wrote me a message through social media. I read horrible news! He said that Kolya died with his friend yesterday at the age of nineteen in a car accident. I quickly told my mom and she said, “No way. It can be true.”

I said, “No, mommy, he really died. I just found the links in news websites about this crash.”

She and I were speechless until the evening. His funeral would be next day, and all of the people who knew Kolya would come to say goodbye to him for the last time in their lives. All of my thoughts were about how life is unfair. How can he die at the age of nineteen, and how can I stop our vacation and fly back home to see him? Until the end, I hoped that it was a joke, that it was a bad dream… but no… it was real. My heart was broken. I felt empty and alone. I finally understood - I lost my best friend, without any words or any goodbyes. That was the same way that we started our friendship – without any words, in deep silence walking together to school, but this time we were far away from each other. During whole vacation, every night I silently cried in my pillow. I was angry at myself. I blamed myself for missing his funeral. Coming back home I realized that my best friend was more to me than just a friend. I had some warm feelings for him that I couldn’t describe. Maybe I loved him, maybe I accepted him as brother, I didn`t know… I still don`t know… But I know he was an attractive, cheerful young boy with a big smile on his face. 

Three years have passed since Kolya’s death and I still miss him. Maybe if I had a superpower to rewind time, I would go back to his graduation and tell him how much I have missed him and that I want to continue our friendship.

I am torturing myself with the fact that after all of this time I still haven’t spoken about Kolya`s death with his mom. I usually meet her in the gym, but we always talk about study or work as if nothing extraordinary has happened in our lives. And I torture myself knowing that I have never visited his grave. But I still feel he is with me, he is watching me from the sky. Now I appreciate every friendship that I have, but none of them can compare to the friendship that I had with Kolya.

With all of my heart, with all of my warm feelings, I will keep you in my silence until my death, my dear Best Friend.

Publication Date: 08-12-2017

All Rights Reserved