The Feelings

I found your handwriting tonight between the years I thought I had survived. The paper had yellowed, but your name had not. It still entered me like a door opening in a house I had spent years trying to burn down. I read the first letter slowly. Not because I couldn't understand the words but because I could. There are sentences that become more painful the older you get. You wrote, I hope you're well. And I wondered if there was ever a version of us where that sentence was true. Outside, the rain kept falling with the patience of someone who knows it will outlive everything. I pressed the letter against my chest as though your heart might still be somewhere inside it. It wasn't. Only the shape of your absence. I had forgotten how you crossed your t's. How your words leaned slightly forward, as if even your handwriting was always trying to reach me. God, I miss the person who wrote these letters. And worse; I miss the person I was when they were written. He still believed that people stayed. He still believed goodbyes belonged to other people. He didn't know that one ordinary afternoon could become the last afternoon and nobody would tell you. He didn't know that someday he would sit alone at a table holding a piece of paper more carefully than he had ever held your hand. There was another letter. Shorter. You said you were tired. You said you wished you could explain everything better. I stopped reading there. Some explanations arrive too late to become forgiveness. Some apologies are only another form of goodbye. So I folded the paper the way you had folded it years ago and put it back inside the envelope. As if returning it could return you. It couldn't. Nothing does. Photographs don't. Songs don't. Dreams don't. The places where we once stood don't. Even memory betrays us eventually. It keeps your face but takes your voice. Keeps your voice but changes your laugh. Keeps your laugh but forgets the exact warmth of your hands. And one day all that remains of loving someone is knowing there used to be a person whose absence could still make your chest hurt. I wonder if you ever think of me. Not dramatically. Not like in the movies. Just once— while washing a glass, waiting for a coffee walking past a window on an ordinary evening. I wonder if my name ever becomes heavy in your mind. I wonder if somewhere you kept one small thing you never had the courage to throw away. Because I kept everything. That is the cruelest part. I kept the letters. The photographs. The dates. The little mistakes in your handwriting. I kept the silence after our last conversation. I kept the version of your face from before I knew it would become a memory. I kept loving you long after love had stopped having anywhere to go. And tonight, with your letters spread across the table, I finally understand: I wasn't rereading your words. I was rereading the last place in the world where you still existed without being gone. So I'll put them away now. Carefully. Tenderly. Like burying something that once had a heartbeat. And when morning comes, I will become someone else again— someone who gets out of bed, makes coffee, answers questions, smiles when necessary, someone who looks completely alive. No one will know that somewhere inside him there is still a boy sitting beneath a yellow lamp, reading old letters, waiting for a future that ended years ago.