Raphael's letters

To the person who stopped answering,

I'm not writing to ask why. I stopped needing the why.

For a while I checked for you every morning. Same answer every day: nothing. Then one morning the nothing had been there so long it stopped being an answer about me. That was the morning the wait ended. Not because you wrote back. Because I did.

So this is the last thing I send, and it asks for nothing. No explanation. No apology. Not even a reply.

Whatever happened, I hope you are well in a way I never get to see. I hope something small made you laugh this week. I hope the reason was not cruelty, and if it was, I hope you outgrow it somewhere I can't watch.

And thank you. There was a stretch of my life you made lighter just by being in it. The ending doesn't cancel the middle.

That's all. The door stays open. I'm just not standing in it anymore.

A sample letter, written for no one. Yours would have a name on it. If you carry a silence like this one, tell me who it is for and one true thing, and I write the first lines back, free. Email [email protected]. If they land: $25, one letter, three days, one revision. The card link comes after we agree, never before.