The Last Summer Before the Move
A free B2-level English story for language learners, readable online in English, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
Tenzin must decide whether to leave for his dream university or stay close to his ailing grandfather.
Tenzin had been accepted to his first-choice university in early spring. It was a program in marine biology on the opposite coast, nearly two thousand miles from home. For months, it had felt like the only thing that mattered.
Then, in June, his grandfather's heart condition worsened, and hospital visits became more frequent than anyone in the family wanted to admit out loud. His grandfather had taught him to fish, to whittle, and to sit quietly without needing to fill the silence with words.
His parents never asked him to stay. If anything, they insisted, almost too often, that he should go and not think twice about it. Despite their reassurances, Tenzin couldn't stop doing the math: four years away meant missing whatever time his grandfather had left.
His friend Nkechi, who had left for university the year before, called him most weekends. She had told him more than once that regret cut both ways, and that staying could be its own kind of loss.
"You'll regret staying more than you'll regret going," she told him bluntly one Sunday. "I know that's not what you want to hear."
"You didn't have a grandfather in the hospital when you left," Tenzin said.
"No," Nkechi admitted, "but I've watched two friends defer their whole lives for someone else's timeline. Neither of them got that time back afterward."
Tenzin spent the last week of July sitting with his grandfather on the porch most evenings, saying very little, the way they always had. His grandfather, who had been listening to the family's careful half-conversations for weeks, finally brought it up himself.
"If you stayed for me, I would spend every day feeling guilty about it," his grandfather said. "Go. Call on Sundays. That's the deal."
Tenzin should have asked him sooner what he actually wanted, instead of quietly guessing on his behalf for weeks. He left for orientation three weeks later, his acceptance letter finally taken down from the refrigerator and packed carefully between two books. On the drive to the airport, he cried the whole way, not from regret, but from a gratitude he couldn't yet name.
