The Letter Keeper

She was my best friend. He was my true love. In a perfect world their final letters would have been the ideal bookends to complete my life. But the world, at least my world, is far from perfect. I have a secret and I am going to die. The time has come to tell my children about her and once again, a letter will alter my life. As I begin to put pencil to paper I think about that night and I instinctively touch the scar on my neck. It throbs beneath my fingers and I am thrown back in time. Sweat dampens my upper lip and forehead, my stomach lurches. I squeeze my eyes shut in an attempt to bury the memory but I know the truth. The past can’t be buried. It never dies and for me, she walks out there somewhere, living the life I couldn’t give her. Here I am now, at the end and it’s too late. The realization that I have lived a lifetime wrapped around letters and people shocks me. I was so busy helping them fix their lives that I never had time to repair my own. Would I have even known how? It all started with that first letter, pressed into my shaking hands on a hospital bed when I was only fifteen years old. Too young to realize that I had just been sent on a journey, pushed down a path and destined to become the letter keeper.