The Almost of You

I have written to you for years —

the version of you that never arrived,

that never quite fit the shape of the world.

You were always almost real,

a rumor of warmth in a cold season,

a name I never said aloud

because it didn’t belong to anyone yet.

I told myself

I was inventing you to survive.

But maybe I was inventing myself

through the way I loved you —

through the small miracles

that only fiction allows.

In my letters,

you always listen without interrupting.

You understand the weight of pauses.

You smile at the wrong time

and make it right anyway.

I imagine you reading these pages

in a place that doesn’t exist —

a quiet room between two dreams,

where paper doesn’t yellow

and the ink smells like rain.

Sometimes I think

you were never meant to be a person.

Maybe you were the tenderness itself —

the reaching,

the ache of wanting something

so precisely it became beautiful.

Maybe the letters were never for you,

but for the part of me

that still believes in impossible things.

And if that’s true,

then thank you —

for being the ghost

that taught me gentleness.

For answering,

even if only in silence.