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When Sebastian saw you for the first time, you had mud in your hair. And you were bigger than him. And with a firm grip on the frog plushie, he was scared. Friends, he heard his mom's soft voice echoing in his head, an encouraging smile promising that it was easier than he thought, making friends. Nothing about you was ever easy. But him… Sebastian had always been an easy choice for you. Eventually, he ended up with mud on his hair as well, and the Valley’s summers were forever changed.
You were only but a fleeting heated memory of dreamed weeks in July, too nimble to even be real. Sebastian was stuck in what you considered to be the loveliest of fantasies, a fairy-tale side character waiting for the princess to arrive, to come back, to give him back some life. You never knew how lonely the Valley could be until many years later, locked in your make-believe wonderful world with the boy and his frog by your side.
When Sebastian kissed you for the first time, he left you stranded. It wouldn’t be the last of it, albeit you didn't know it back then. He ran before you could even process what the funny tingling in your lips meant and you never told another soul about it. At nine, you don’t know much about rejection and fear and infatuation. So when you met again two days later, you just pretended it didn’t happen, in hope time would wash the doubt away. It never did.
And what is there to do when your best friend kisses you? You grew up to the understatement that, to any other adult, maybe it was just child’s play, trying to grow up too fast. However, somewhere in your heart, the question remained unanswered and unpronounced, locked in a box with old diaries and dormant feelings.
When Sebastian saw you for the last time, none of you truly said goodbye. You promised to see him next summer, he promised to wait. And he did, but you never came back. And though he never admitted, he counted years through the change of seasons, from each spring to summer, every July, waiting for your return. And there’s something about a heart that breaks like clockwork, a love that refuses to settle. None of you knew its name, but it lived through the wire that connected your souls. He gathered stories and trinkets, toys and ideas he dreamed of sharing with you until they were shaped like the most sorrowful nightmare: you were gone.
He burned the letters he wrote you, growing older to realize what exactly could a child do? Sebastian didn’t know who to hate. It wasn’t your fault, but you promised. You promised. Locked inside the tales of your daisies’ cover diaries, foes and friends awaited for your return, even if you never did.
You never did.
But…
When you saw Sebastian again after fifteen years, he was in love with another woman. Or so you thought. The reconciliation was not easy in any aspect. You were both hurt. You would be lying if you said you haven’t thought about that stupid kiss for days on end before your arrival. And Sebastian… Sebastian wasn’t ready to tell your tale again. For once, the magic world of Stardew Valley didn't stop when you left. It kept growing, and it kept going, and once your return became a merely forgotten summer prophecy, you became a memory to your own story.
It took some time before the apologies could work. A lot of effort was made into gathering the pieces of a child’s broken trust. Because, although two adults were left to pick up the pieces, most times all you could see whenever you looked at Sebastian was a boy with mud in his hair and a frog plushie under his arm.
When Sebastian met you in the graveyard, under the rain, that’s when you finally could see the grief standing between the two of you. In the drawings of a children’s book, on the edge of the paper, nothing but a mere smudge of a pencil — the story never told, the people never met. In the force that pulled you into each other’s orbits, no matter how much you tried to run — the second chance. Kindred souls, meant to be combined.
And then you told him. About mom and dad and grandpa. About loss, life and death. About leaving and never returning, about losing part of yourself. It was hard for you to accept that things would have to be left behind. You thought your heart was big enough to carry them all around. But choices come and choices go, and to fight for a middle ground was to attest nothingness. You had to pick a side.
You chose to hear him. Chose, for once, to let someone else tell your story. And Sebastian finally showed you the truth. The hurt and the passing of time. The love that never went away. Whatever it was that was scratching the walls of its enclosure, begging to be freed. And he let it.
You let him.
Freedom was choosing to stay.
When Sebastian kissed you again, he didn’t run this time. He lingered. And you questioned, all of the words once locked inside suddenly bathed in the sunlight. And you finally talked. About your feelings and how it felt falling in love with your best friend. About the hidden memories and growing around a secret flower field. About coming home.
You had finally come home.
He was terrified, just as he had been that summer so long ago. What was anger if not fear dressed as something braver, after all? But he stayed too, talked too. And for once, there was no loss, time, distance or unrequited love standing in your way. All you had to do was make the choice and stay.
So you did. You both did.
When Sebastian moved in, none of you cared for a proper wedding, even if the entire town was waiting for the invitation to come. There was no love confession that could not be made at dusk in your family’s weed field, the crickets your only witness. No discourse to be read that meant more than your return, your arrival home, the long awaited end for your lifelong fantasy story.
You were finally old enough to understand that happily ever after didn’t exist. That all time you had together was finite and precious, and maybe you were running out of time each morning, watching it pass you by every night.
Still, you stayed.
And when Sebastian watches you run under the sprinkler’s rain each morning, the tortuous wait finally doesn't look so bad after all. Because for once he was sure: time would pass anyway, and his love would find her way back home each and every time.