The Almost Letter

Dear David,

She wrote the words and then deleted them. Typed them again.

Dear David,

I realize you’ll never see this.

Delete. The cursor blinked accusingly.

It had been three months since the accident. Three months after she’d stood at his hospital bed as machines breathed for him until they didn’t. Three months of lugging conversations they’d never have, apologies that would never be spoken, explanations that would never be heard.

The grief counsellor mentioned letter writing. “Sometimes,”

Dear. Chen went on, adjusting the wire-rimmed glasses she had been peering through, “we need to be able to express the things that we left unsaid. No need to send the letter. It just has to be written."

But Maya couldn't write it. When she did try, the words wilted; too small and frail to bear the burden of what she didn’t say.

David,

I never should have waited to call you back that night.

Her phone buzzed. Her sister had texted her a: I’m coming over with Thai food. Don't argue.

Maya shut the laptop without saving it. The document would go off to digital oblivion, and join dozens of other past tries. But for some reason, just typing out those few words on the screen — even when she knew they would evaporate — loosened something in her chest.

When Sarah showed up with pad that and spring rolls, Maya found herself airing her disappointment about the letter she couldn’t write.

What do you wish you could say? “So what was that all about?” Sarah said, transferring the food to mismatched plates.

"That's just it. I don't know." Maya picked at a spring roll. “We were arguing over something really petty. Whether to get married at the courthouse or have a big wedding. I told you that we should wait until we could afford what we wanted. “Life does not wait for perfect timing,” he said.”

"He was right."

"I know. I knew it then, too. But I was stubborn. I hung up on him." Maya's voice cracked. He was on his way to my house to apologize when it happened. And if only I had called him back..."

Sarah leaned over and took Maya's hand from across the little table. “You can’t live in the ‘if only. "

But Maya was already inside it, in the space that exists between what was and what could be. That night she dreamed of David sitting at her kitchen table, reading over her shoulder as she typed.

You really were such an overthink, dream-David said, with that teasing lilt in his voice.

I’m trying to apologize to you.

I know. I always knew.

Maya opened her eyes with tears on her cheeks and truth on her tongue.

The next night she opened the laptop again. This time, she didn't delete.

David,

You’ll never see this, but I have to write it. Maybe that’s the point — that you won’t see it but I’ll say it for once.

I meant to call you back that night. I should have said yes to the courthouse wedding, yes to your imperfect timing, yes to the life we could have had right away instead of someday.

You were driving over to make amends but I was the wrong. I was scared of not having enough money, not enough time, not enough everything. But we already had enough. We had us.

I miss how you would hum making breakfast. I miss your terrible jokes. I miss how you’d always take a book out of my hands, leave it open on my nightstand on whatever random page you’d just read and write some stupid margin note.

I located your copy of "Beloved, the one full of marks and scribbled notes". You wrote, on p. 247 “Maya would cry here” and you were right — I did.

I miss our future. I miss the fights we’re never going to have, the makeup sex, the way you leave dishes in the sink, I’d probably nag you about it. I miss Christmas morning and lazy Sunday and how you’d fall asleep during movies, but still wake up in time for the denouement.

Dear. Chen says grief is not about getting over it. It's about carrying it differently. I’m learning to hold you with me, not to bear the weight of what I’ve lost.

I love you. Present tense. I love you, and that’s not past or future — it just is.

I’ll send this email to your former address even though it bounces. I’m going to print it out and stick it in the box with your stuff. And I’m going to fold it into an airplane and throw it off the Space Needle. I’m going to do all of these silly things because love has to go somewhere; I’m ready to let it.

That’s what ghosts are, maybe — not an afterlife, but a widower’s longing that lingers in the world.

All my love (so very, very much)

Maya

P.S. I’m going to plant that vegetable garden you wanted. Although, I will very likely kill everything. Especially since I’ll likely end up killing everything. You would have a real good time watching me do it.

Maya read the letter three times before pressing send. Of course, the email bounced right back. But something had shifted. The words now lived somewhere in the digital ether, even if they would never reach their intended recipient.

She printed the letter on cream-colored paper, folded it neatly, and put it into the wooden box where she stored David’s watch, his favourite T-shirt and the engagement ring they never got to use.

That weekend, Maya drove out to the nursery and purchased tomato seedlings, basil and a packet of sunflower seeds — David’s favourite. She had never gardened before, she said, but YouTube could teach you anything.

On her knees in the dirt behind her apartment building, planting seeds in soil that might or might not tend them, Maya had felt David’s presence like sunlight in the afternoon through cloud cover — not quite tangible, but warm and real enough.

No one would ever read the letter, but it had already served its purpose. The words had travelled through her fingers to the page, taking a little bit of the weight she was carrying with them. The garden could come up short, but it was the planting that was important, not the crop that came up.

Three months later, when the first tomato turned colour, ripening to a luxuriant red, Maya picked it and held it the way one might hold a little miracle. She ate it while standing in the garden, salt from tears mingling with the sweet juice.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the almost-form she took everywhere now.

The sunflower leaves rustled in the wind, and Maya chose to listen to it as "you're welcome."

There are some conversations that take place in the world between speech and silence, between presence and disappearance. Not all letters report in by delivery; instead they arrive through the writing.

Some love thrives best in the soil of what is no longer, but not really, there.