Unsent Letters

I don’t remember when exactly I began writing them, only that it was after you left.

At first, the words came easily.

I wrote about the weather, what I had for lunch, and the song that had been circling my head all afternoon. I told you about school, about the little things that happened and disappeared before the day was over. 

Ordinary things. Meaningless things.

The kind of things I would have tossed your way in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, had you still been here to catch them.

I never thought much about where the words went after I wrote them. I folded the pages, slipped them into envelopes, and tucked them away.

Then, slowly, the letters changed.

The sentences became longer. The spaces between them grew wider.

I began writing about the mornings—the way they seemed strangely hollow, as though the house had forgotten how to wake. I wrote about the silence that lingered in the rooms, about familiar corners that my eyes still searched without permission.

I wrote about everything I had never learned to carry alone.

Some days I wrote only your name.

Some nights I filled entire pages and still felt as though I had said nothing at all.

I never sent a single letter.

I sealed each one carefully and stacked them in an old box beneath my bed, where dust gathered quietly over the years. Perhaps I was afraid the letters would never reach you.

Perhaps some part of me already knew they couldn’t.

Sometimes, when the night falls too quiet, I take the box out.

The paper has softened beneath my fingers. The ink has begun to fade at the edges, surrendering little by little to time. I read the words again and met versions of myself I had almost forgotten—the one who still expected an answer, the one who wrote as though writing enough words would close the distance.

It is strange to read them now.

The letters feel like windows left open to a room that no longer exists.

Still, I write.

I write because there are some silences too vast to leave untouched. Because there are things the heart refuses to bury simply because the world has taught it how to continue.

So I keep the letters.

Unsent. Unanswered.

And perhaps that is all they were ever meant to be—not messages waiting to arrive, but small pieces of me, released into the quiet.

I like to think that somewhere, beyond the places my hands can reach, the words are still finding their way to you.

Not through the post.

Not through the distance.

But through whatever remains between a heart that remembers and a soul that has gone ahead.