A poem
In the bottom drawer lies the unfinished letter,
collecting dust for years
between forgotten keepsakes and old photographs.
The ink has faded like memories,
blue script barely legible now.
I find it when searching for relics of you,
sifting through our history in boxes packed away.
I don’t remember writing it.
Or who I even meant it for
a friend, a lover, someone forever lost to time?
I trace the anxious slant of the handwriting,
smell the stationery kept too long.
Between the lines, I detect an aching melancholy,
words unspoken but pulsing alive
within the fibres of the paper.
What burst of courage or despair led me
to nearly bare my soul to you that day?
What inner turmoil swayed my hand,
guided the pen to etch these revelations?
Did I intend a final goodbye,
or a plea for you to stay?
The first paragraph a torrent,
emotions flooding through the ink.
Then halting, hesitating, the message left incomplete.
Were you ever meant to read the truths
I cradled secretly in paragraphs and stanzas?
Now I can only guess what happened next.
If you left or loved me back.
If the faltering phrases were soon forgotten,
or mourned for words
that might have saved us.
I let the letter fall back into darkness.
Some things are better left unsent, unsaid.
But still, I wonder what lives
in the spaces between those lines,
the silence between us that will never break.
That which was written, but never sent.
Never meant to be read by anyone
but me.
