#UnsentLetters: Maybe It Was Meant To Hurt Like This

Unsent Letters is a newsletter curated by Shakira Sison featuring unspoken sentiments gathered from reader submissions. It features unsent letters to real and imagined lovers. 

I wrote you 748 letters in the last two years, all of them unsent. In each of them is the same question masked in different shades of denial and blanketed by a hopefully convincing impression of composure; a plea hidden behind saccharine vibrance and false strength I’d hoped you’d detect.  

In each of them are words I had labored over cups of your favorite coffee, words I’d strung together in the middle of the night waiting for your voice to beckon me to bed. 

In each of them is an image of you painted in strokes of longing and passion, in bold colors of regret, in a glaring hue of desperation.

In each of them is a battle between letting go of my greatest love and holding on to my biggest pain.

I have gone through the motions of burying every memento that I ever had of you, only to find it burrowing into my core. I’ve tried to burn your letters in a crackling flame, but I found your words catching fire in my soul.

I’d moved and left and yet here I am again. So now, 71 plane rides and 12 states later, I stopped trying.

Because even though I’ve exhausted all my friends’ patience with endless nights of ugly crying, even though I get eye rolls and sighs of dismissal when I mention your name, I’ve come to terms with the fact that maybe it was meant to hurt like this.

Maybe it was meant to take this long.

Perhaps I needed all those nights to finally realize that no matter how many poems I wrote about the folds on your palms; no matter how many cities I map under the hair on your chest, you wouldn’t have understood.

Because you look for love in the shining sand while I hold my breath under water. You look for love in the ink on my skin while I write your name on every kind of paper. You look for love in places I would never think to put them and I put them in places you never think to go.

You look for love in the form of twinkling constellations forgetting that I’m the sun. And that when I shine, the stars do not. You forget that they are there still, even when you do not see them. That I am here still. Even though you refuse to look.

So I guess in my 749th letter I want to tell you I love you.

No more metaphors and allusions. Just you and me, bare, uninhibited, and love in between: I love you.

I etched it on my skin right where your lips always lingered. I wrote it on the sand where you used to lay. 

And I dim my light in the sky so you could see the stars in their glorious glimmer.

I want to tell you I love you in all the ways your eyes choose to see it, but you’re no longer looking.

So as the water laps over my words on the hot white sand, as the stars fight to shine their brightest, and as your name burns on the skin of my chest, I send this final letter in hopes you send one back. – Rappler.com

Do you have your own Unsent Letter? Send them to unsentletters@rappler.com. Selected letters will be anonymized and edited for clarity and brevity. By submitting to Unsent Letters, you represent that the work is your own and that you waive your rights to it for present and future publication.