The Letter Kept in a Shoebox

The paper has gone the color of old teeth, and the ink has faded to the blue of distance— some words already returned to white, already sky.

I hold it the way you'd hold a moth, afraid of what wings know about the dark, about going toward light.

Your handwriting leans into the right margin like someone walking into wind, as if the words were still in motion, still trying to reach me before the envelope closed.

What I remember is not what you said but the sound of your thinking— the pause between sentences where you must have looked up, out a window I never saw.

I fold it back along the old creases, which remember the shape of themselves better than I remember anything. The shoebox receives it. The lid comes down like an eyelid, gently.