Letters you can't write

You don't get the version where I'm over it.

Everyone hands you the same script. Forgive. Release. Be free. As if anger is a stain to scrub off, and the one who put it there gets to be a lesson by the time you're done.

Here is the letter I'd write instead. Not the knife. Not the blessing. The truth, sent to where it lands.

I learned to read a room before I learned to read. I learned your footsteps. Which ones meant the door. Which ones meant me. You looked at me and saw a stranger. That's the part I kept. Not the hands. The eyes.

You were sick. I know that now. I knew it then. It doesn't make you a mystery. It makes you my father, and both things are true at once.

I'm not writing this to forgive you. I'm writing it to stop carrying you like a coat that never fit.

You don't get to be the reason I go cold on people who didn't do it.

That's the shape. Send it, burn it, or leave it in the drawer with the rest.

If you have one of these in you, I write them. The first line is free. Tell me who it's for, and one true thing about them.

greyhawthorne