The Weight of Unsent Letters

Margot stood on the balcony of her corporate apartment, the orange sunset bleeding across the Miami skyline like a bruise. In her palm, she held the crumpled letter she'd written to Sarah three years ago and never sent. Some things were better left buried.

You don't just lose a friend, Sarah had told her that night in the stairwell outside their office. You choose them, over and over, until one day you simply stop choosing.

Margot had borne that truth for three years. The promotion—Sarah's promotion, the one Margot had convinced herself she deserved—had been the final blow. But it wasn't really about the job. It was about the years of passive-aggressive emails, the backhanded compliments at happy hour, the way Sarah had looked through her instead of at her in their final months together. The slow erosion of affection that neither had the courage to name.

Now Sarah was dead. Pancreatic cancer, moved through her body like a secret she kept too long. The office had sent flowers. Margot had sent nothing.

She looked at her hand, at the lines crossing her palm like dried riverbeds. A fortune teller in New Orleans once told her she had too much life line, too little love line. Margot had laughed, bought her a drink.

The hotel bar downstairs had a mascot—a taxidermied bear the owner claimed his grandfather shot in Alaska. It stood behind glass, fierce and frozen and utterly pathetic. Margot had drunk beside it for three nights running, staring into its glass eyes and wondering what Sarah would say if she could see her now.

Probably nothing. That was the problem.

Margot let the letter fall from her hand, watched it drift toward the ocean eight floors below. Some choices, she realized, you make every day without knowing it. And some things, once broken, can't be chosen back together again.