A Love Meant to Be

Letters Unsent

Marla sat at her desk long after the city had gone quiet, the amber glow of her lamp turning the room into a pocket of warmth in a world that otherwise felt frozen. The silence was loud, oppressive even, and her fingers hovered above the keyboard as though the words, the confessions she had been burying for weeks, might materialize if she just stayed still long enough.

She exhaled sharply and began to type.

"Dear Ethan,"

The words alone were enough to make her chest ache. She hadn’t said his name aloud in days, but it lived inside her like a rhythm, like a song that wouldn’t leave. Even writing it felt like breaking some unspoken vow of silence she’d made with herself, that she could get through this by avoiding the gravity of him.

Her fingers moved quickly, more quickly than she intended.

"I don’t know if this is a letter I’ll ever have the courage to send, but I need to let these words exist somewhere outside of my body. You ask me with your eyes what’s wrong, why I’ve pulled away, and I can’t say it. I can’t break the silence because I’m afraid if I start, I’ll tell you everything, and you’ll see how much of me already belongs to you. And that terrifies me more than losing you does."

Her chest tightened. She paused, staring at the blinking cursor, her heart racing as though he were standing right there, watching her confess.

She shook her head, hit save draft, and closed her laptop.

The letter would stay unsent.

Across the city, Ethan sat at his kitchen table, his own glass of whiskey untouched. The storm outside tapped against the window like restless fingers, the sound syncing with the relentless thrum of his thoughts.

His notebook lay open before him, pages filled with half-scribbled lyrics, sketches, fragments of the things he never said aloud. Tonight, though, there were no lyrics, just words. Raw, unpolished words.

"Marla," he wrote, pressing the pen hard enough to nearly tear the paper.

"You think I don’t notice the silence, but I feel it like a wall between us. I don’t know what I did, or if I even did anything, but I can’t shake the thought that maybe you’re slipping away. And the truth is, I don’t want to lose you. Not now, not when you’ve become the one steady thing in this chaos I call my life. You don’t even realize how much light you bring into a room, do you? You sit there pretending you’re invisible, and yet every time you laugh, I feel like the world’s been set right again. God, I miss that laugh already."

He stopped, dragged his hand through his hair, and let out a low laugh that held no humor. What was he doing? Writing letters like some lovesick boy from a Victorian novel? He folded the page, shoved it into the back of the notebook, and poured himself another drink.

Neither of them would send their words. And yet, the drafts, the fragments, became a ritual, a quiet tether between them, unspoken but alive.

Marla found herself writing late at night, when the loneliness was thickest. She wrote about the bookstore where they met, about the way his hand had steadied her when she almost slipped in the rain. She wrote about the timbre of his voice, the safety she felt when he was near. Every draft felt like a confession, a slow stripping away of armor she refused to take off in his presence.

"You make me want things I promised myself I’d stopped wanting," she typed one night. "You make me reckless with hope, and I don’t know if I can forgive you for that."

But she never hit send.

Ethan, too, wrote when the nights grew long. His words were clumsy, not the kind of polished charm people expected from him. He didn’t write like he was trying to impress her, he wrote like he was trying to breathe.

"You’re in my head constantly," one letter began. "I’ll be in the middle of a conversation, and I’ll think of something you said weeks ago and start laughing like an i***t. People think I’ve lost it. Maybe I have. Maybe you’ve ruined me, Marla. But if that’s the price, I’ll pay it."

He stuffed that page deep into the drawer of his nightstand, slamming it shut as though that could quiet the truth.

Days turned into weeks, and the silence between them stretched like an elastic band pulled taut, threatening to snap. On the surface, they still shared casual greetings, fleeting conversations, the bare minimum to avoid suspicion. But beneath it all, a storm brewed.

Ethan tried, God, he tried. He showed up outside her office with coffee, only for her to take it with a polite smile and an excuse about a meeting. He texted her small jokes, the kind that used to make her reply instantly, but her responses now came late, clipped.

He could feel her slipping. And it killed him.

Marla, meanwhile, rehearsed conversations in her head, arguments she never voiced. She told herself distance was safer. That if she didn’t let him close, he couldn’t hurt her. But every time she closed another letter with unsent, she knew she was only lying to herself.

Her walls weren’t keeping him out. They were suffocating her.

One evening, rain pattered lightly against her windows. Marla sat cross-legged on her bed, journal open. This time, she tried handwriting instead of typing, the ink staining her fingertips as though the words were seeping into her skin.

"If you knew the truth, you’d run," she wrote. "Not because you’re weak, but because I’m too much. Too complicated. Too scarred. You’d see the parts of me I keep hidden and realize I was right to push you away. And still, part of me wishes you’d fight for me anyway."

Her throat tightened, tears threatening. She pressed the pen harder, scrawling the next lines like a plea.

"Fight for me, Ethan. Even when I don’t let you."

She slammed the notebook shut, heart hammering. The words felt dangerous, too raw to exist. But they did exist, now. They were out of her head, carved into paper.

Ethan, at the same time, sat with his guitar resting against his knee, not playing, just holding it. Music usually gave him clarity. Tonight, it only amplified the noise inside him.

He reached for his notebook and wrote without stopping, like the words had been waiting at the edge of his skin for days.

"You think silence protects you, Marla, but it only punishes us both. I don’t need perfect. I don’t need easy. I just need real. And I’d take your chaos, your scars, your everything, over the emptiness of anyone else."

He underlined the last words three times, his hand shaking. He closed the notebook and shoved it aside, pacing the room as if movement could shake off the weight of it all.

But he knew, knew in his bones, that no matter how many letters he wrote, no matter how many words he locked away, they wouldn’t matter until he said them aloud.

And that terrified him.

The irony wasn’t lost on either of them: two people writing their truths into the void, two people bleeding onto paper while pretending indifference in person. The letters piled up, unsent and unread, while the distance between them deepened.

Yet, in some strange way, the act of writing tethered them. Like invisible ink, their emotions lingered in the spaces between, waiting for the right light to reveal them.

And maybe, just maybe, those unsent letters were the only reason they hadn’t lost each other entirely.

For now.