Tap. Tap. Tap.

You look up from your assignment, and blink your watery eyes to see the water drip slowly from the tap. A sigh leaves you, and you push back your chair, which creaks under your weight.

The table in front of you is laden with papers and notebooks, textbooks and highlighted notes. High school, huh? You remember that one time you couldn't wait to graduate, but now, you feel like you might miss it a little.

The only light in your bedroom is the dull orange glow of the lampshade opposite you, the light soft and not glaring into your eyes the way white does. The papers are endless.

Your fingertips catch the end of your pencil dangling from one of your English textbooks, and you almost drop it, but another swift movement lands it on the pile of papers once again. The book's spine is bent in the middle at a page from weeks of rereading, and it teeters and falls open on the very sheet.

Merchant of Venice.

Your nose scrunches in distaste, but before you close it, your eyes fall on one of the pages hanging out from between the book. Head tilting to the side in confusion, you lightly grab hold of the paper, before pulling it out of the open book.

The page is yellow and unlined, like those you see in the teachers' lounge way too often. It's marked with pencil marks, and one of its corners is folded, but by accident.

It doesn't look too old.

You stare at it, and then realise that it's a letter. An incredulous raise of the eyebrows later, you're reading through the yellow sheet.

Well.

How do I start this off? I believe it's not a very reoccurring theme in most high school careers for the teachers to post an answer to their students' assignments. But I think this was called for, and quite important, because a letter like that cannot go unanswered.

Your assignment on the theme of friendship, Y/N, was quite...curious. It was interesting, to say the least, and quite set apart from the tedious hours of poring over lines and lines of others writing about loyalty and classic textbook examples.

What made it different was that it was truthful.

You may not realise it most of the time, but that was what I was truly looking for. Even if you don't try to make someone believe it, you bear true faith to your statement about friendship, which is something I honour.

Yes. Friends are indeed family.

As you bared your soul to me once, I, as your teacher of literature and language - the fine arts, the best means of communicating your thoughts, ideas, and most importantly,  emotions - I find myself obligated to do the same.

I guess you're bored of the formal English used here, but it becomes a habit.

Maybe you won't open your books after you graduate this class, but maybe one day - perhaps ten, twenty, fifty years later, you'll find this in a dusty old box, in a dusty old cabinet.

I had a family, once.

I had friends, too, but I'm not too sure if this particular friend considered me her own. She was shunned by her family - and in turn, she shunned me. I don't know if the bond we shared was half as powerful as the one you wrote of, but there was something. Something.

Anyway, I lost contact with her, and I don't really know what happened to her. My family never really supported my dream of becoming a teacher, because, well - the low pay grade, the problems, the lack of honour - but I followed it nonetheless.

I think you're right. It truly is like the touch of a feather.

The most important things leave an impact with the weakest of forces, don't they? When something feels unimportant, taken for granted, regular? Isn't that was impacts us the most, in the subtlest way?

Maybe, enlightenment is realising this.

As your teacher, and - undoubtedly - as your friend, I want you to know that even if I did things that may have made you see me in a bad light - I'm not always right.

No one is.

In the spirit of that, and of friendship and change - I hope you will feel the feather's touch someday.

Love,

Oh Sehun.

P.S. If you're curious about the girl, her name was Baekyeon. She had green eyes - I don't know if that's relevant, but it mattered back then.

Something's warm in your heart as you fold up the piece of paper, and think of your English teacher and a green-eyed girl.

And even though nothing is permanent yet, you feel hope.

And that's all you need for now.