Letters I Never Sent

In the second drawer of my grandmother's writing desk, tucked beneath a bundle of dried lavender, I found thirty-two letters. All of them addressed. None of them stamped.

I read them slowly, over the course of a summer. Not because they were long — most were only a page — but because each one felt like a small door I did not want to close too quickly.

The bravest thing we do is often the thing we almost said.

There was one addressed to a man named Samuel, dated April 1963. She never spoke of him. I do not know if he was a lover, a brother, or the boy who once carried her books home from school. Perhaps it does not matter. What matters is that she wrote to him. That she kept writing, even when she knew she would not send it.

I began, that summer, my own drawer. It is not yet full. But it is a comfort, on evenings when the words feel too heavy to send, to know that they still have somewhere to go.