Drafted Letters
Maggie kept her drafted letters in the back of her desk drawer, behind old tax returns and bill receipts she’d never need. The drawer sticks when it’s pulled it too fast, so she always opened it slowly, as if secrecy depended on gentleness.
It was a manila folder, softened at the edges. She used to tie it with a fraying blue ribbon which had long since deteriorated, but now secured it with nothing more than habit. Inside are envelopes addressed but never stamped, folded pages creased along careful thirds, ink pressed deep enough to leave impressions on the sheet beneath.
She’d been writing goodbye letters since she was fourteen.
The first one was written on lined notebook paper in a bedroom in Walnut Creek, the night she and three of her brothers were put on a plane to New Jersey to live with their Dad and his new wife. She’d recently made friends with a girl named Lynae, who liked Maggie for herself, not just as a way to get close to her brothers.
I didn’t know I would have to move, she wrote. You were my first real friend.
She never mailed it, but it set the precedent. Houses changed. Schools changed. Even the shape of her family shifted like weather patterns no one could predict. By eight she understood that adults could fracture. By fourteen she understood that stability was a rumor. By seventeen she understood that love did not mean permanence
There was a letter to Jackie in New Jersey. Roberta and Peggy in Montana. A boy in Chico who mistook convenience for love. A neighbor who had let her borrow sugar and tried to offer more.
She tried to explain, to apologize. But the letters remained unsent, kept in a manila folder in the back of her desk.
Now, at twenty-eight, she lived alone in a tidy apartment with neutral walls and furniture she could sell on short notice. She worked in corporate health insurance, climbing the corporate ladder as her dad had done. It was steady and structured. Her savings account was reassuring. She liked that money stayed where she put it. She told herself it was enough. She didn’t have friends, but she had acquaintances, coworkers she’d go to lunch with, but never accepted invitations for events outside of work.
Careers didn’t leave you unexpectedly, people did.
William moved into the apartment across the hall in early spring. She noticed him because he carried his boxes himself, refusing the dolly offered by the building manager, as if proving something to himself.
They slipped into friendship easily, the way people do when neither is looking for more. They cooked together occasionally. He helped her mount a bookshelf. She edited his résumé when he mentioned applying for a promotion.
“Why don’t you have any pictures on your walls?” he asked one evening.
“I don’t like clutter.”
“Why don’t own any plants?”
“Because they die.”
“You’ve been here almost a year, and you still haven’t unpacked all the way.”
She smiled tightly. “You’re very observant.”
He didn’t press, and that was part of the problem. He didn’t demand vulnerability, he created space for it. And space was dangerous.
She began a new letter.
It lay now at the top of the folder, cream paper torn from a heavier pad she kept for no practical reason.
Dear William,
That was as far as she got.
She was interrupted by a call from the office, a last-minute request, a late meeting, a corporate urgency that felt easier than vulnerability. She slid the unfinished page into the folder and pushed the drawer closed.
The following Sunday, William helped her fix the loose hinge on the desk drawer. It had been catching worse lately.
“You have to pull it straight out,” she said, kneeling beside him.
He tugged gently, then a little firmer. The drawer slipped forward unexpectedly, overshooting its track. The folder slid free and landed open on the rug between them.
The pages fanned outward like pale wings.
Maggie’s breath caught in her throat. His letter was on top, in her careful handwriting.
Dear William,
“You’re leaving?” he asked quietly.
Her throat closed.
“I always do.”
The words sounded small, spoken aloud.
He set the page down carefully, as if it might bruise. “How many are there?” he asked, nodding toward the stack.
She swallowed. “Eight,” she admitted, heart pounding with emotions she never let herself feel.
“When my parents split,” she began, not because she planned to but because the truth pressed upward, “we had just moved from one end of California to the other. My parents tossed us about like a football, first to New Jersey, and then a year later to Montana. Eventually I stopped caring. Stopped letting myself get attached to people or places. Every time I got close to someone, I was forced to move away. It’s what I’ve learned to do.”
“Don’t go,” he said, his blue eyes blazing with intensity. “I love you.”
She flinched, not from the words, but from the certainty in them.
“I know,” she whispered.
“Then why are you writing my ending?”
Because endings are safer than uncertainty. Because if I script the departure, I control it. Because I learned to choose exile before someone else chooses it for you.
“I don’t know how to stay,” she admitted.
“Then don’t promise staying,” he said. “Just stop planning your escape.”
Her eyes burned.
He reached for her hand, and this time she didn’t pull back.
“I’m not asking for forever,” he said softly. “I’m asking you to stop shuttering yourself behind your walls, before anything has a chance to grow between us.”
The word settled between them.
Shuttered. Closed against the possibility of love, of a life with William.
She looked at the letters scattered on the floor, the careful ink, the rehearsed explanations, the practiced retreat.
“I was going to tell you I loved you,” she said, nodding toward the unfinished page. “And then I panicked.”
He smiled gently. “You could still tell me.”
“I do,” she breathed.
It felt like stepping into open air without checking the forecast.
Later that evening, after he returned to his apartment, Maggie gathered the letters. The paper was soft from years of handling, edges worn, ink slightly faded.
She carried the folder to the small metal trash bin on her balcony. The night air was cool. A neighbor’s wind chime clinked faintly.
She struck a match.
For a moment, she hesitated, not because she wanted to send them now, but because they had been her armor. Proof she had not been careless. Evidence she had felt deeply, even if no one else knew.
The flame caught the corner of the first page. The paper curled, blackening, ash lifting in fragile spirals. She fed the others into the fire one by one, watching the words dissolve.
Apologies turned to smoke, explanations to embers.
She held the unfinished page the longest. Dear William... Then she let it burn too.
Not because she didn’t love him, but because she no longer needed to pre-write her departure. When the page had collapsed into glowing threads, she leaned against the balcony rail and let the cool air touch her face.
Inside, the desk drawer remained open. The folder in the back was gone. No more drafted goodbyes.
Her heart still trembled. But it was no longer shuttered. And for the first time in her life, she did not have a goodbye waiting in the dark.
