“Autumn, Unsent”

Letter One – Winter

Dear You,

It’s been forty-seven days since you left without goodbye. The first snow came early this year, thick and soundless, blanketing the street outside my window like a page waiting for a story I no longer know how to write.

I tried pretending you were just late — that your name lighting up my phone was simply delayed by weather, or time, or whatever current drags people away from the shores they once called home. But even ghosts need intention, and silence has its own gravity.

Do you remember the scarf you left draped over the chair? I wore it once, just to feel the shape of your absence. The scent of rain and cedar was still clinging to it — faint, stubborn, refusing to fade, like the echo of a half-finished song.

Everyone tells me closure is something you give yourself. But how do you close a door that was never shut?

Still, I light the candle by the window each night, a lighthouse for a ship that already sank.

Unsent,

—A

Letter Two – Spring

Dear You,

It’s raining again, the kind of soft rain that turns city dust into watercolor. The cherry blossoms are trying their best this year, though I can’t help thinking how fragile it all is — pink petals clinging to wet branches, daring the wind to be kind.

I saw a man at the café today who looked like you from behind — same curve of the neck, same habit of rolling up his sleeves just before lifting the cup. My heart did that stupid thing — the jump, the disbelief, the collapse. When he turned around, it wasn’t you. Of course not. It never is.

Sometimes I write your name on napkins just to cross it out again. It’s not an act of hate. It’s practice.

I wonder if you kept the letter I slipped into your coat pocket last summer. The one that began, “I think I finally understand what forever means.” I suppose that was my first lie — not the words themselves, but the assumption that you’d still be there to hear them.

Maybe we never lose people; maybe they just take the version of us that belonged to them when they go. You left with my laughter, my hunger for thunderstorms, my belief that love could stay. I hope you’re treating them well.

Unsent,

—A

Letter Three – Summer

Dear You,

The world is loud again. Windows open, heat humming through the air, everything sticky with life. I’ve started watering the plants you used to forget about. They’re thriving. I find that funny — that what you neglected now flourishes under my care. Maybe I’m learning something. Maybe survival is the quietest form of revenge.

I still talk to you sometimes. Not out loud. Just in the space between moments — when the kettle whistles, when a song ends, when I step into the sunlight and it blinds me enough to believe you might still be there.

Someone asked me last week if I was seeing anyone. I laughed. I said I was in a long-term relationship with my own healing. It sounded poetic, but it’s true. I’m learning the rhythm of solitude, and it’s not as lonely as I feared.

There are days I don’t think about you until nightfall. That’s progress, isn’t it?

If love is a season, then grief is the weather that follows — unpredictable, relentless, but temporary. I’m beginning to see blue skies again, faint and fragile.

Unsent,

—A

Letter Four – Autumn

Dear You,

The leaves have begun to turn — fire-colored, falling slow and deliberate. The world smells like endings, but this time, I don’t mind.

I found all the letters I wrote you — folded neatly in a box beneath my bed. It’s strange how they feel both heavy and weightless. Words once urgent now read like someone else’s diary. I’ve decided not to burn them. Instead, I’m letting the wind have them. Each one will find its own place to rest.

You see, autumn was never the end. I understand that now. It was a pause — a breath before change, a silence before song.

I no longer need to know where you went, or why. What mattered was that for a brief, beautiful span of time, our stories overlapped like leaves pressed between pages. We were a chapter, not the book.

I still walk past the park bench where you first kissed me. It’s covered in gold now, the kind of gold that only happens when everything’s about to fall. I sit there sometimes, not to remember, but to thank the world for allowing me to love at all.

If by some chance this letter ever reached you, I’d want you to know: I’m okay. Truly.

Unsent,

—A

Epilogue – The Unwritten Letter

There’s one more letter I won’t write.

It doesn’t begin with “Dear You.” It doesn’t ache. It doesn’t reach backward.

It lives quietly in the curve of my smile when I see the morning light catch on the leaves, in the warmth of coffee shared with a friend, in the soft certainty that everything lost finds its own way of returning — not as it was, but as something lighter.

If you ever think of me, let it be on a day when the air smells like rain and beginnings.

Because I’ve learned that love doesn’t vanish. It transforms.

And autumn, my love, was only ever a pause.