“Unsent Messages”

The room is still. The only sound is the soft ticking of a clock on the wall and the faint hum of night outside the cracked window. A breeze slips in, cool and gentle, stirring the edge of a forgotten page on the desk. Beside it, a pen hovers – uncertain, like its writer.

She’s been sitting there for hours. Maybe longer. There’s no one to ask and nothing pressing to do. Only this: a journal half-filled with thoughts she doesn’t say aloud. Letters never sent. Words she’ll likely never read to the people they were meant for.

Isn’t that how it usually goes? We hold back. We write drafts, delete messages, tuck away emotions in the folds of our thoughts, telling ourselves “not now,” “maybe later,” “what’s the point?” And somewhere in between all those silences, something real fades. A moment lost. A goodbye that never got said. A truth we were too afraid to speak.

Maybe it’s fear. Fear of hurting someone, of being hurt, or of facing a truth she’s not ready for. So she lingers in the space between knowing and not knowing, wondering if keeping quiet is safer – or just another way of pretending it doesn’t matter.

She writes a line, then stops. It’s always like this: wanting to be honest but not brave enough. Longing to reach out, but never dialing the number. Hoping someone else will say the things she’s too scared to speak herself.

Sometimes, though, she thinks silence is the loudest thing we have. A goodbye left unspoken still carries its weight. A confession buried stays alive in the heart of the one who couldn’t say it. Not speaking, she realizes, is often a message in itself.

So she writes. Slowly. Quietly. Because even if no one reads these words, they need to be let go. What we don’t say doesn’t disappear; it settles, until we find a way to release it.