Chapters We’ll Never Write

There are stories that never reach the page. Not because they are unimportant, but because they carry too much truth to be safely told. They are the kinds of stories that would wound us all over again if we dared to speak them aloud. Some remain unwritten because we fear what they might stir. Others stay locked inside us because they belong to people who can no longer read them.

This is one of those chapters. I have carried it in my chest for years, as if keeping it unwritten would keep it from becoming real. But silence, I have learned, does not erase what happened—it only makes it heavier.

It begins In winter. The city was cold, but not in the kind of way that makes you shiver—it was the kind of cold that seeps into the soul. The streets wore a layer of grey, and the air tasted faintly of smoke. That morning, the sky looked like it had been painted in shades of ash.

I was twenty-four, still trying to convince myself that life was waiting for me somewhere just around the corner. I worked in a small bookstore where the air smelled of paper and dust, and my only real comfort was that the job was quiet enough for me to hear myself think. It was there that I met her—Amina.

Amina was unlike anyone I had known. She spoke softly, but her words had weight, as if she measured each one before setting it free. She had this way of looking at people like she could see the exact thoughts they were trying to hide. When she smiled, it felt like the sun had broken through a storm. She came in every Thursday at exactly four o’clock, always wearing the same long grey coat, always asking for books that no one else seemed to want to read.

We never spoke of anything too personal at first—only about books, about the weather, about how the city seemed too fast for people like us. But every week, the conversations grew longer. I began to notice the tiny details about her—the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was nervous, the faint trace of henna on her hands that hadn’t fully faded, the scar just above her left eyebrow.

Then, one evening in early March, she didn’t come.

The next Thursday, she still didn’t. And the one after that. Weeks passed, and the space where she used to stand in the bookstore began to feel like a wound that refused to heal.

I told myself she had probably moved away, found another bookstore, gotten too busy. But the truth settled in one cold afternoon when I saw her name in the newspaper.

It was buried deep in the inner pages—a short, quiet paragraph about a car accident on the highway just outside the city. Three people had died. Amina’s name was the last on the list.

I remember staring at the words until they blurred. The world around me went silent, like someone had pressed pause. My hands were shaking so hard the paper tore between my fingers. I don’t know how long I sat there, but when I finally moved, it was only to put the paper away, as if hiding it could undo it all.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to intrude—that I wasn’t family, that I wasn’t important enough to be there. But the truth was uglier: I was afraid. Afraid of standing in that crowd and realizing that I had been nothing more than a passing figure in her life, someone she had forgotten long before that day on the highway.

Weeks became months. The bookstore felt emptier than ever, the shelves heavier with books she would never read. I began to write letters to her in my mind—letters I would never send, filled with all the things I had never said. I imagined telling her about the first time I noticed her, about the way her voice could turn the most ordinary sentence into poetry, about how her absence had hollowed out a part of me I didn’t know could be touched.

But I never wrote them down. I told myself that some things were better left unwritten, that putting them on paper would make them final.

And yet, the unwritten chapter didn’t fade—it grew. It lived in the pauses between my thoughts, in the way I glanced at the door every Thursday at four, as if she might still walk in wearing that grey coat. It lived in the stack of books I kept on the back shelf, the ones she had asked about but never bought.

Two years later, I finally visited the place where it happened. The road was narrow, lined with tall, unfeeling trees. I stood at the edge of the asphalt, watching cars pass in waves of wind and noise. The world had moved on. The road didn’t remember her. But I did.

I knelt and placed a single book on the grass—a copy of The Little Prince, the one she had once told me she loved as a child. And for the first time, I allowed myself to speak her name aloud into the cold air.

It struck me then that the cruelest thing about life is not the endings we see coming—it’s the ones that take us mid-sentence. The chapters we never get to finish, the words we never get to say, the people who vanish before we have the courage to tell them what they meant to us.

Sometimes I think about what I would have written if I had the strength. Maybe I would have told her that she was the closest thing to home I had ever found in another human being. Maybe I would have told her that she made the winter feel less cruel. Maybe I would have told her that I wished we had more time.

But that is the thing about the chapters we never write—they are not blank because they are empty. They are blank because they are overflowing. Because no matter how many words we pour onto the page, they will never hold everything we felt.

Years have passed since that winter, and I still work at the same bookstore. The shelves are older now, the paint a little more faded. Every Thursday at four, I still glance toward the door, though I tell myself I’m not waiting anymore. Maybe I’m lying. Maybe a part of me will always be waiting.

I have written countless stories since then, but none have been as heavy as the one I never wrote. The chapter is still there, unwritten, living quietly between the lines of everything else I put on the page.

And perhaps that’s where it belongs. Not every tragedy needs to be told for the world to know it mattered. Some stories exist simply to remind us that we loved, that we lost, and that we survived—though not without scars.

The chapters we’ll never write are not lost. They are the hidden roots of who we are. And though no one else may ever read them, they are etched in us, as permanent as the heartbeat that carries them.