A collection of tiny prose fragments about the people we leave behind, and the ones we never quite meet.
Some people never receive the words we write for them.
Because we’re too late.
Or too early.
Or too scared.
Or too changed.
And yet, we write them anyway.
In our minds.
In our journals.
In the margins of other people’s books.
These are some of mine—
Love letters I never sent, but still carry.
To the one I left before I was ready:
I think we both knew. You just said it first. I still fold the towels the way you taught me.
To the stranger I almost spoke to at the bookstore:
You looked like a version of me I’d forgotten how to be. I hope you bought the poetry. I hope it changed you.
To the one I stayed with too long:
I was trying to love you enough to love myself. It didn’t work, but I don’t blame you anymore.
To the one who left without warning:
I wanted closure. Instead, I got character development. I’ve made peace with that, but I still check for your name sometimes.
To the version of me that loved too hard:
You were never too much. You just didn’t know how to hold yourself with two hands yet.
To the almost, the maybe, the never-was:
I keep thinking we were supposed to meet five years from now. Maybe we still will.
I don’t think love always needs to be returned to matter.
Sometimes it’s enough that it existed. That it moved through you. That it asked something of you and left a mark in its wake.
A Home for All My Leaving is full of exits like these.
What Still Lingers is what happens when they echo.
Neither book offers resolution.
But both hold space for the unfinished.
And maybe that’s all some love stories ever become—unfinished, but deeply real.
