Music was the last ripple, a thin thread stretching across silence. Her hands moved, trembling, sketching out the shape of a letter that was never meant to arrive. The paper waited, blank yet restless, while the ink hesitated, like breath caught in the throat.
Her story was never only her own; it had him woven through its lines, in presence and even in absence. Yet the words she tried to summon to him would not obey. They scattered in a bamboo plant may be refusing to be released or released in frenzy moves.
She wanted nothing of this struggle. What she wanted was slumber — not the light drifting of sleep, but the deep burial of the self where no echoes follow, where even memory grows tired of haunting. It was here, in the in-between of writing and forgetting, that the first letter was filed. Not written in ink, but carved in silence. Not sent, but initiated.
It remains an unfinished fragment — the opening to a correspondence has not yet began, the weight of love suspended between pen and sleep.
Why We Still Write Letters
A letter begins long before the ink touches paper. It starts in silence — in the pause before words, in the gathering of thoughts that feel too heavy or too fragile to be spoken aloud. Writing a letter is not only about reaching someone else; it is about making sense of oneself.
People write letters when their voices falter. The written word allows for hesitation, for revision, for lingering on emotions that the tongue often rushes past. A letter is not conversation — it is the architecture of memory. Every curve of handwriting carries a weight, every fold of paper becomes part of the story.
Letters have always been more than communication. They are confessions that could not be spoken, apologies too delicate to deliver face to face, declarations of love that demand permanence. To write a letter is to trust that your words can travel across time and distance and still arrive intact, even if the sender has long since changed.
In the digital world, messages vanish with a swipe. Letters endure. They yellow at the edges, they carry the faint smell of a drawer or a box hidden under the bed. They become artifacts of lives once lived, of relationships that stretched between absence and presence.
People still write letters because sometimes the heart demands slowness. Because writing allows a person to sit with their longing or grief or tenderness, to shape it carefully rather than spilling it out unformed. Because a letter makes the intangible — love, memory, sorrow — visible and tangible.
Above all, we write letters because silence alone is unbearable. A letter becomes a bridge, even when it is never sent. And in that act of writing, the writer whispers to themselves: I was here. I felt this. It mattered.
