The Unsent Letter

A seventh specimen from the letter shop. No buyer, no sender.

Your brother told me. Not carefully. He was tired and I was standing there.

I've carried it since like a stone in a coat pocket, and I never once spent it.

So I have known. Through every ordinary afternoon. I've handed you sugar, asked after your mother, and held the one thing you'd have torn the roof off to have.

Nobody tells you what being the one who knows is like. It isn't power. It's a hallway with no door and someone else's music playing at the end.

I almost said it on the stairs that night. You asked if I was all right. I was one second from handing it over and calling the handing friendship.

I didn't. You were happy then, and I decided I had no right to put a weight on a man who wasn't carrying it.

That might have been tenderness. It might have been me keeping the only thing I had that you didn't.

You'll never read this. That was never the shape of it. But a thing carried for years by one person should exist on paper at least once, where it can be read without being spent.

Specimen seven. Unsent, like the rest.