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For the last few days, I’ve been writing letters to you. Letters about letting go. About moving on. About finally accepting that whatever this is, it has nowhere to go. I write everything I’m too afraid to say, then I read it back and delete it. Every single time. Because somewhere between writing I need to let you go and actually doing it, I realise I don’t want to. I know I should stop looking for meaning in the smallest things. I know I should stop hoping, stop wondering, stop letting you take up so much space in my head. But I can’t seem to make my heart agree with any of it. So I delete the letters. Not because they aren’t true. Because they are. And maybe that’s what scares me most. I can write a hundred endings for us, but I still can’t bring myself to believe in one. I keep telling myself that one day I’ll wake up and you won’t be the first thought that finds me. That your name won’t ache anymore. That I’ll finally be able to think of you without wondering what might have happened if I had been braver, if circumstances had been different, if you had somehow felt the same. But the truth is, I’m not writing these letters because I’m ready to let you go. I’m writing them because I’m terrified I never will. And maybe someday you’ll move on without ever knowing that there was someone quietly loving you from the sidelines. Someone who wrote your name into pages you’ll never read, then destroyed every one of them because admitting the truth felt more frightening than losing you. That’s the cruelest part. You may never know how much I loved you. And I may have to spend the rest of my life pretending I didn’t. So I’ll delete this letter too. I’ll erase every word, close my eyes, and tell myself this was the last one. And tomorrow, I’ll probably write you another. Because apparently, letting you go is the one thing I can write about endlessly, and the one thing I will never actually do. And maybe that’s how I’ll lose you: not in some dramatic goodbye, but quietly, one deleted letter at a time, until there is nothing left for you to ever know except that somewhere, once, you were loved by someone who never got the chance to tell you.
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