Letters ·
Letters I never sent
A stack of envelopes tied with string, a fountain pen, and the strange relief of writing to somebody who will never read it.
4 min read
In the bottom drawer of my desk there is a stack of letters tied with string. They are all addressed, most of them are stamped, and none of them were ever posted.
I found them in June, looking for a spare nib. I knew they were there in the way you know about things in the bottom drawer: vaguely, and with no intention of opening it. There are twenty-three of them. The oldest is from 2009.
Who they were for
Some are to people who have died. Some are to people I still see every week. One is to a teacher I had when I was nine, who I am fairly sure would not remember me. One, I am embarrassed to say, is to a man who sold me a bicycle.
I did not open them. That seemed important. I sat on the floor and read the envelopes, my own handwriting changing over the years, the ink going from blue to black and back again, and I remembered most of what I had wanted to say.
The point of the letter
I think the point of those letters was never the reading. It was the writing, and the deciding not to send it. A letter you don’t post lets you say the whole thing, without the part of you that edits for the reader. You find out what you think. Then you put it in the drawer, and you don’t need to say it any more.
I tied them up again, put them back, and found the nib. That evening I wrote a twenty-fourth, to the woman who taught me to write with a fountain pen. That one I posted.
