The Letters I Never Sent

 There are letters

I wrote to you

in the half-light

between midnight and rain,

when my heart, like an inkpot,

spilled slowly across

the silence of paper.

I folded them carefully—

creased with care,

sealed with breath,

but never mailed.

Some still sleep

in the bottom drawer,

yellowing at the edges,

pressed flat

like forgotten petals

between the pages of a life

I never shared.

Each letter

was a voice I could not become—

too proud,

too afraid,

too late.

They speak of things

you already knew—

the way your absence

entered a room

before your footsteps did,

how your laughter

clung to my sleeves

long after you left.

They speak of

mornings that tasted like waiting,

of words I swallowed

so you wouldn’t see

how much I needed you.

They ask nothing now—

these letters—

only to be read

by the ghosts

of the people we were

when we still touched

each other’s names

like offerings.

There is one

I wrote and burned—

on a night so quiet

I could hear

my own forgetting.

Ash never complains.

It just drifts

into the air

with the same grace

as your silence.

Would it have mattered,

had I sent them?

Would your eyes

have softened

at the edge of my name?

Would my words

have traced a path

back to your hands?

I will never know.

But some nights,

when the sky feels

like a wound

that never scabs,

I still write—

not to send,

but to remember

the shape of my voice

when it still knew

how to miss you

out loud.