letters to boys

I've written a lot in my life. Papers, stories, journal entries, poems. So many words on paper in my short 23 years. But perhaps the most interesting and revealing of all writings are not the diatribes of my day or the creative fantasies of my child brain, but the letters. The letters I'll never send.

Yes, most of them are to boys. Typical, I know. With the notable exception of my journals disguised as letters to my long-passed mother, I can't think that I've ever written a letter I didn't send to a girl. There were love letters, hate letters, hurt letters. And as I got older, there were apology letters. Most of the time they were my way of conveying feelings I knew I would never have the chance to, or was better off not to. It was a way to gain closure when there was none. You never got an answer, but at least you didn't get one you didn't want.

I'm sure some people would say this is the cowardly way out, but what I've realized is that it isn't a way out — it's a way to heal.

But what happens when one day, someone answers the letter you never sent? As if he had been trying to write the same letter you always were, only he actually sent it? How would you respond?

It isn't as if I've been waiting for that letter, because I never expected it to come at all. Does it change everything? Surely not. But it changes some things.  It changes my view of him. It changes how I look back on those events. That perhaps I did do the right thing, at least in part. That perhaps it made a difference, even if he couldn't appreciate it until now. That perhaps it wasn't all for nothing.