Dear Braden

It was signed and stuffed inside an envelope and sitting on the desk in front of her. She just stared at it. The desk was cluttered with all sort of things that she’d never bothered to put in their place, or even find a place for them at all. There were notebooks and key chains and pencils and magazines and books and even a pair of shoelaces. The envelope was tossed on top of them carelessly. Its edges were creased and worn, tiny fibers sticking out like a baby’s short, thin hairs. There was a return address in the top left corner, hers, written in red pen whose ink dragged from letter to letter in a rushed sort of way.

The letter inside was written in red pen too. She remembered that much about it. She remembered that she wrote it on lined paper that came out of a green-covered pad that she swiped from her Spanish classroom. She remembered that she had been sitting on her bed, and that she had been listening to a mix of his favorite songs that he’d compiled for her. She hadn’t put it on especially to write a letter. She hadn’t meant to write a letter at all. She didn’t write letters.

She’d put the mix on because she was in the mood for something that she didn’t normally listen to. She was feeling a little restless. She’d felt that a lot since she moved here three months earlier. And then the music got her thinking. It reminded her of him, and of how much she missed him, and of how long it’d been since she talked to him. So she decided to write him a letter. The pad of paper was sitting on the floor within reach, and the pen was on her bedside table. The cap made a satisfying snap as she removed it and the tip scratched against the paper as she began to write. And write and write and write.

She wrote two pages, front and back. Her handwriting got worse the faster she wrote, and the more she wrote the faster the words came. By the end, she wasn’t sure if anyone would be able to read it. She hardly could. She didn’t read it over when she finished. She just folded it into thirds and dug out an envelope from deep within the cabinet on the left side of her desk. She pushed the letter inside and folded the top of the envelope down. She’d folded the paper poorly, and had to crease the top again to close the envelope. She scrunched her eyes closed and licked the entire adhesive strip of the envelope before pressing it down.

And now she was standing in front of her desk a month later and she could remember all of that and she knew the letter was to him, but she couldn’t quite remember what she said. She partly wanted to rip it open and read it, then reseal it, but she also knew that she had promised herself that she wouldn’t do that. The letter had been floating around in her backpack and in her desk drawer for a month until she had pulled it out ten minutes before. And she couldn’t remember what was in it and she didn’t know if she should send it. She knew that she told him things. Things that she had wanted to say to him before but that she didn’t say. Things that they almost talked about once, before she backed down. Now she wished that she’d talked to him when he tried to bring it up. Maybe it said that in the letter. She just couldn’t remember.

No, that wasn’t the problem. She could remember. In fact, she had a very good memory. She knew what she said in that letter. She was just losing her nerve and pretending that she couldn’t remember as an excuse for not pasting a stamp to it then and there. With fresh tenacity, she pulled a black pen from the rubble on her desk and scrawled out his name, then looked up his address in Boston and wrote it beneath “Braden Laurence.” She had a sheet of stamps around somewhere, and after some frantic sifting through everything on her desk, she found it. She peeled one off and stuck it in the top right. It was crooked.

She picked up the letter and tapped it against her hand. The envelope flopped and creased in the center. The face of it looked odd, as she had written her name and address in red pen and his in black. She stared at it and realized that she could never send this letter.

Yes she could. She could send it. All she had to do was drop it in a mailbox. There was one just a block away. She’d put it in, it would cross the country in a few days and then he would get it. And he would read it. And he would think… she had no idea what he would think. What if it was too late? Too late for a letter like this, too late to do anything about it. Then she would just feel stupid. She hated feeling stupid.

She would wait; that’s what she would do. She wouldn’t make a decision now. To do so would just be rushing things. She might make the wrong choice. It she waited longer, long enough, then maybe the next time the beaten envelope surfaced, she would send it without a second thought. Maybe she would make a choice then. She didn’t want to back down; she didn’t want to cop out and throw it away. But she couldn’t send it. So she would just wait.

Author's Note: I wrote this for a class, actually. It's a true story, only I changed a few details. I still have the letter in my desk drawer.

So let me know what you think.