The Unsent Drawer
In a drawer with no lock, the unsent letters pile up: an apology from April, a goodbye from June, and a letter that keeps stalling at its third sentence.
The desk drawer at Paperweight Stationery has no lock. There is only one rule: you may take back only what you yourself wrote. The owner never opens it. Even tidying, he handles the envelopes unread. So the sentences inside are known only to the people who wrote them, and to this story.
A story can open the drawer. There is a short list of things only a story can do, and this is one of them. Tonight it takes out three letters, in the order they arrived.
A letter from April. Addressed to Doyoung Kim.
Doyoung. The way we went quiet after the seating changed, I think about it about once every other month. It was me who knocked your pencil case off the desk. But everyone laughed, so I laughed along. That's all it was. That's all it was, and it's been three years. I'll tell you after exams. This letter is a rehearsal.
Letters that call themselves rehearsals are the commonest kind in the drawer. The real performance usually happens outside, in speech. Or it doesn't happen. The drawer doesn't know what came after. Not knowing what came after is the drawer's whole job.
A letter from June. Addressed: To the Alley.
Forty years I lived here, renting. The wall still has the pencil marks where we measured the children, though I can no longer tell whose line is whose. The new place has an elevator, they say. It will be kind to my knees. But alley, I liked you for your stairs. For being uphill. For making the walk home cost a little effort every day. I liked the cost. Goodbye.
A letter addressed to something that isn't a person can never be returned to sender. Which is why some letters are written, from the first line, to what cannot receive them. Being unable to send and being unable to write are different problems. So people write.
A letter from October. The line for the addressee is blank.
However many times I rewrite this, I stall at the third sentence. The first sentence says I'm sorry. The second says this is not an excuse. From the third on, it keeps becoming one. That's as far as today goes.
Letters without a third sentence kept arriving after that. The same handwriting. Two in some months, none in others. The sentences overlapped a little less each time. In the most recent one, the second sentence had changed: โEven saying it isn't an excuse sounded like one, so I crossed it out.โ
In the summer, a customer in a school uniform came back. They stood at the drawer for a long moment, then took the April letter and slid it into a pocket. The owner was sharpening pencils at the till and did not look up. Not stopping people who take back their own: that is the other half of the rule.
What became of that letter, the drawer doesn't know. Whether it turned into speech, or back into rehearsal. Only that the drawer grew lighter by one envelope, and that somewhere outside it, something worth exactly that much weight happened. Or didn't.
On top of the stack now lies an envelope where the smell of ink hasn't faded yet. Addressed to Father. No street, no number. In this drawer, that has always been enough.
In the next margin
The third story belongs to the notebook behind the till, the inventory the owner keeps at night.
The scene from another angle
A Selvora Original ยท Mina Seo
A house byline of Selvora Editorial