The Message I Almost Sent

By [Hubaib Ullah ]

I still have it saved in my drafts.

One hundred and seventy-three words. Seven paragraphs. Three spelling errors I never fixed. The kind of message you type furiously in the heat of midnight clarity and then stare at for twenty minutes, unable to hit send.

I never did.

It was meant for Amina. You don’t know her. Most people didn’t. She wasn’t loud or flashy. She didn’t light up a room—she made you feel like you had a candle lit in your chest, warm and flickering, only noticeable once she was gone.

She sat behind me in sophomore chemistry. We talked once—just once—about which elements sounded like villain names. I said Bismuth. She said Ruthenium. I didn’t know then that she’d be the one name I’d never forget.

We became friends the way you slowly get wet in a rainstorm—first just a drip on your shoulder, then somehow soaked to the bone. We never defined anything. We just existed near each other. Long bus rides. Shared playlists. Silence that wasn’t awkward. She’d laugh like she didn’t mean to, like joy surprised her every time.

And I—well, I was the silent type. Always thinking too much and saying too little.

By our final year, I knew I loved her. Not in the movie-way. Not with fireworks or sweeping gestures. I loved her in the quiet ways: saving her favorite seat in the library, memorizing the way she liked her coffee, texting her the moment a new Phoebe Bridgers song dropped.

She never knew.

Not because I didn’t want to tell her. But because I was always waiting for the right time. After finals. After college acceptances. After graduation. After…

I wrote the message three nights after she stopped answering.

At first, I thought it was just one of her digital detoxes. She’d vanish offline for a week sometimes, say it helped her “detangle her soul.” But this time felt different. There were no signs. No updates. No returned calls.

And then, on a gray Thursday, the news came. A car. A highway. Rain-slick roads. Wrong place, wrong time.

I never knew how heavy air could feel until I heard the words: She didn’t make it.

So I wrote her that night.

The message wasn’t perfect. My grammar fell apart. My punctuation ran wild. But my heart was stitched into every word.

“Amina, I don’t know if I should be sending this. But I need to say it—somewhere. You changed me. You were the first person who saw me before I even saw myself. You were my favorite hello and the hardest almost. I wish I’d told you more. I wish I’d said I love you when I had the chance…”

It went on like that. Messy. Honest. Too late.

I hovered over “Send.”

And then I saved it in drafts.

Some days, I open it and read it like a poem. Like a prayer. Like a window into the life we didn’t get to live. I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d told her earlier. If I’d been braver. If love could’ve anchored her to this world just a little longer.

But life doesn’t deal in maybes.

It deals in silences. In missed calls. In messages almost sent.

Last week, I finally started deleting old conversations from my phone. Friends I don’t talk to anymore. Numbers I don’t remember saving. I was about to delete the thread with Amina, but I couldn’t.

Not yet.

Because that thread still holds the last real thing I never said out loud.

Because maybe, in some strange cosmic way, the things we don't say still echo somewhere.