Flash Fiction: The Letter
I hold your letter with shaking hands. You belong to a different lifetime, one that saw a different piece of the world and a broken heart and a child that no longer exists. You belong to a place that has remained behind a locked door, deadbolt rusty after years of stillness. Silence.
I hold your letter with shaking hands and immediately imagine the world that opened up when another me made a different choice, the opposite choice. The dimension that was born when the other me persisted, instead of giving up. I imagine that you let me in, that you became a person who trusted and let go and decided that you were allowed to feel something other than the resignation you’d carried so long, like a security blanket. I fantasize that there is more than just a smile on your face – I fantasize that now it reaches your eyes.
I hold your letter with shaking hands because none of those things happened. Instead I became a different person and the place where a kiss was stolen, the place where we, finally, met, hours before you left on a plane, was filed in the folder labeled “Past Life.”
Past life. Except now you are no longer past. You are here, and I am different, but am I, am I truly so different? I do not think so. I do not think so.
I hold your letter in shaking hands and agree to do something I know is wrong.
The repetition of that first line makes this seem like a mantra or something. Very interesting technique.
Thank you! It just seemed like the right thing as I was typing this.