The cardboard box smelled of dust and forgotten things. Elara had dragged it from the back of her closet, intent on finally decluttering her life. She expected old tax returns and university textbooks. She didn’t expect the past to sucker-punch her in the heart.
On top of a stack of notebooks lay a bundle of letters, tied with a faded ribbon. Her own handwriting stared back at her. To Liam. But the stamps were untouched. They had never been sent.
With trembling hands, she untied the ribbon. The first was dated three weeks after The Last Coffee Date.
‘I keep waiting for you to call. I replay that entire morning, trying to find the moment I should have swallowed my pride. Was it when you packed my books? When you took your key? I was so sure you were going to ask me to stay.’
Her breath caught. She read another, from a month later.
‘I saw a movie you would have hated today. I cried in the dark, not because of the plot, but because I couldn’t turn to you and whisper a joke about it.’
Each letter was a raw, unvarnished confession she’d never had the courage to mail. They chronicled her anger, her loneliness, and her slow, aching realization of her own role in their demise. The final one, written almost a year after their split, was the simplest and most devastating.
‘I think I understand now. We were both standing on our respective hills, waiting for the other to wave the white flag first. I was so busy guarding my own pride, I didn’t see you guarding yours. I’m sorry, Liam. I’m so sorry I didn’t say it then.’
Tears blurred the ink. All this time, she had believed his silence was a testament to his indifference. These unsent words proved it was a testament to a hurt that mirrored her own.
Across the city, in his own apartment, Liam was undergoing a similar excavation. He’d found a shoebox tucked behind his winter sweaters. Inside were dozens of crumpled notebook pages, each a letter he’d started and abandoned.
‘Elara—I drove by your old place tonight. The lights were off. It felt wrong.’
‘I picked up the phone six times today. I don’t even know what I would say. ‘I was wrong’ seems too small for the canyon between us.’
His own words mocked him. The arrogance, the stubbornness. The last draft was a single, shaky line:
‘I miss you. That’s all. I just miss you.’
He had never written her address on the envelope. He’d been too afraid she would send it back unopened, that her silence was a definitive answer.
They sat in separate rooms, miles apart, holding the same tragic truth in their hands. A truth that could have saved them, had either been brave enough to send it. There had been no villain in their story, only two heroes, stubbornly defending a kingdom that had long since turned to dust.We were archaeologists of our own heartbreak,unearthing boxes of unsent confessions. My letters, your drafts—all saying the same thing: "I was waiting for you." We were two proud sentinels guarding empty castles, each waiting for the other's white flag. We held the proof that our love didn't die from a lack of feeling, but from a surplus of pride. The tragic truth was in our hands all along: the apology we desperately needed to hear was the one we were both too stubborn to send.
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