There are eleven letters in the drawer, written between 2009 and 2014, none of them sent. I found them while clearing out a desk last month and read through all eleven in one sitting, which I do not recommend doing without preparing yourself for the particular vertigo of meeting a much younger version of your own handwriting mid-argument with someone who, in most cases, no longer exists in your life in any form.
Eleven Letters, Five People
The letters are addressed to five different people. Two are to my father, written after arguments I remember with total clarity and he, I’d guess, would not remember at all. Three are to a woman I dated for two years in my mid-twenties, one of them written the week we broke up and never once mentioned to her in the eleven years since. The rest are scattered — an old friend, a mentor I fell out with, one addressed to no one in particular, just “to whoever reads this,” which felt, at seventeen, like a reasonable way to address a letter.
Confidently Wrong
What strikes me now isn’t the content so much as how confidently wrong the letters are about their recipients. The letter to my father assumes an adversary who wanted to control me; rereading it at thirty-eight, with much more context about his own father, I don’t recognize the man the letter describes. The letters to the woman I dated assume a villain, or occasionally a savior, and in both cases a person far more central to my life than, in honest retrospect, she probably was. The letters got the facts roughly right and the person almost entirely wrong.
The letters got the facts roughly right and the person almost entirely wrong.
What the Drawer Was For
I think this is what unsent letters are actually for — not a failed attempt at communication, but a private, necessary act of getting someone wrong on purpose, safely, on a page nobody else will read, so you can arrive at the more complicated and less satisfying truth later, in person, or not at all. The letters were never really about persuading their recipients. They were about building a version of the argument I could survive having.
I’m not sending any of them, eleven years on. But I no longer think that not sending them was a failure of nerve. I think the drawer did exactly what it was for.
- Rilke, R.M. (1929). Letters to a Young Poet.
- Barthes, R. (1977). A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.
