The Last Letter

Clara had never recklessly used her heart. She wrote her emotions in notes and pieces of paper and slipped them in drawers, boxes and even the back pockets of her backpack at times. There was their safe place, no one touched them, they were carefully folded so that the world could never read them. all the same some of the words were too strong to tell, so delicate that they might be rejected or be misunderstood.

She had led a routine life: she woke up, walked to work, pass up the same streets, with the same people, smile, come home, and wrote in her journals until the pen ran out. And still, every night, she could feel the pain of things unspoken--the words that accumulated like dust in her heart and were not recognised and became heavier with each and every day.

Only when she had found the old box in her attic did she become aware of how many words she had locked up. The box was dirty and battered and nearly covered by a pile of ancient text books and photo albums. She uncovered letters to people she loved, people she hurt, people never to be forgotten, as soon as she opened it. Memory of some cheerful, some bitter, but all written and sealed, with hope, or regret.

The final letter attracted her attention. It was written to Daniel, the boy she had so secretly loved in high school. She knew him at once, great, and bashful, with a lopsided grin that stampeded her heart. She never had the courage to confide the feeling to him, lest she destroyed the friendship which they had so diligently cultivated.

She shook as she opened up the letter, rubbing dust off the edges of the letter.

I do not even know whether you will ever read this, but I want you to know that you changed the world view in the way I see it. Although I am never going to tell you in other words, I hope you know how much you meant to me.

Clara, almost bitterly, laughed. It was five years later that she wrote it and life had taken her away out of that small town, but the feelings were new, crude. She had laid them deep and had acted as though the usual daily routine and the distance would smother their longing, but it had only strengthened them.

Days she sat and looked at the letter, and turned it around, and read aloud to the room where no one was present, and allowed her voice to have the burden of unbroken speech. It was weird and reassuring and agonizing simultaneously. She had not known how long she had had to say such things, how important it still was.

There was a queer time about the universe, it was. One rainy Thursday, as she walked along a well-known street, passing the cafe on the corner, she was still thinking about the letter and his memory in its entirety was travelling back and forth. And there he was -- Daniel. Older, taller, more self-confident, yet obviously him. He seemed nearly as much surprised at seeing her as she was at seeing him.

Clara perceived a familiar object in his hand: it was the envelope. Her envelope.

"Clara?" His voice was warm as she had known it was, with a kind of hesitation, as though he doubted whether this moment might ever come into existence.

She froze. "Daniel... you have--"

I was found, and I gave it to you, he said, to you. I believe there was somebody who wanted us to have closure... or something.

Tears welled in her eyes. The decades of silence, of longing, of letters never written, had resulted in this. And yet, no words were needed. Both were aware of how deep the feeling had been that had always existed between them all this time and was making a difference in their lives.

They strolled to the cafe, and sat facing each other, and had the rain falling on the windows, and made a beat that was as wonder-working in their hearts as the beat of their thunders. Discussions were modest at first, and awkward, but gradually the recollections seemed to come. They joked about old things, told about old escapades, and in all their tales, all their looks, they found the unity which had never been really destroyed.

When the dialogue stopped, Clara eventually uttered the words she wrote long ago: You altered the manner in which I view the world.

Daniel smiled, and his eyes were kind and understanding. "And you've changed mine. I just didn't know it until now."

It was neither a big statement nor theatric avowal, but in its muffled vowel it had centuries in it. The letters had served their purpose-- not as such, of paper and ink, but as ships of truth and daring, of faith and of manliness, of courage, which fear and time had made separate.

When the rains finally ceased and the sun came out through the clouds and shed golden light over the street, Clara and Daniel were able to see that something extraordinary had occurred. Life had not ceased with them waiting; it had been waiting to see them come up. The things they never uttered had not been forgotten, they had been just waiting to get the right time.

And there in that cafe of which corner is the smell of fresh coffee, and the gentle chatter of the other customers, two hearts met again. Not out of the guarantee afforded by the letters, but because they were bold enough to leave the words to speak at last.

At times, the things that we leave unwritten, the things we leave unsaid, the things we leave undone, those are the things that are the most powerful.

And to Clara and Daniel, after years of it, the last letter had sent them home.