The drawer
What happens to the message you write and never send?
My mother taught me to write it anyway.
She kept a notebook in the drawer under the phone. Not a diary. A place for the sentences she didn't say. When she and my father fought she wrote the thing she wanted to throw at him, folded the page, and put it in the drawer. She never showed him one.
I asked her once why she wrote them if no one would read them. She said the writing was for her and the not-sending was for him. Two different kindnesses.
She died in March. I opened the drawer. There were hundreds. The first was from 1987 and it was the worst thing I have ever read about my father. The next, same year, was an apology. The next was a list of groceries.
I stopped reading. Not because of the anger. Because of the groceries.
I keep my own now. It's a folder in my phone called Drafts and it has three messages in it, all to the same person, all written, none sent.
I don't know yet which kindness this is.
If you keep one of these, I'd like to hear about it. [email protected]