The Weight of Unsent Letters

The attic dust motes dance in a sunbeam,
landing on boxes crammed with forgotten things.
Like these unsent letters.

Pages yellowed, edges frayed,
filled with words I swallowed whole,
words that clawed their way up my throat
but never escaped.

To you.
Always to you.

I remember the sting of the pen,
pressing too hard against the paper,
leaving indentations that mirrored
the canyons forming in my heart.

Each letter a battlefield,
fought and lost before the ink dried.
Fear, my constant commander,
ordering me to retreat, to silence.

Because what if?
What if you didn’t feel the same?
What if my clumsy words shattered
the fragile peace we’d built?

So I folded them, tucked them away,
into the dark recesses of my desk,
into the deeper, darker corners of myself.

The weight of them grew heavier with each passing year.
A stone in my gut,
a knot in my chest,
a constant, dull ache.

I see your face sometimes,
in the crowded street, in the flickering screen,
in the ghost of a dream.
A fleeting glimpse of what could have been.

And the letters whisper, a chorus of regrets.

But time, that relentless river,
carries us all forward, whether we're ready or not.
You’re gone now, in a way that's more final than distance.
A different kind of silence.

The letters are relics now,
testaments to a past that can't be rewritten.
I hold them, carefully,
like fragile butterflies.

There’s a strange comfort in their weight,
a tangible reminder of the depth of my feeling.
Even if those feelings were never spoken.
Even if they were buried alive.

Today, I burn one.
Watch the paper curl and blacken,
the ink dissolving into smoke.
A symbolic release.

It doesn't erase the years,
or the what-ifs that still linger,
but it lightens the load, just a little.

The other letters stay.
A history lesson,
a warning,
a bittersweet memory
of a love that lived only in the silence between the words.
And that's okay, I think.
Finally, it's okay.
The dust motes settle.
The sunbeam fades.