Katherine Howard — twenty-something, crown on her head, death warrant in the mail — signing off to Thomas Culpeper with “Yours as long as life endures” and life enduring only a few weeks. Imagine the neck she pressed that ink with. Imagine being so horny you forget the King of England reads your mail.
Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf: “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.” Reduced. As if wanting a woman is subtraction, when it’s the only mathematics that ever added up for me.
My ex had one too. Folded into a square so small it could hide in a bra cup. A woman’s handwriting — that dangerous, feminine cursive that smells like perfume even in black ink — telling him she would always love him. Always, like she’s God. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in women who write like that. I still wanted to throw up.
A love letter is not romance. It’s contraband. It’s an organ smuggled across a border. Politicians have lost careers over them. Teachers have lost licenses. I’ve lost my mind over a Post-it note that wasn’t even addressed to me.
Nabokov made an entire book out of one, turning a child into a diary entry: “My sin, my soul.” Which is disgusting, yes, but also proof — the body can be archived. The body can be narrated until it’s permanent.
I never wrote letters growing up. I kept everything in my mouth, where it could rot quietly. And then, early this year, I wrote my first letter to a boy. He’s never going to read it. That was the point. I wrote it to survive the confusion of wanting someone far away — someone I could never tell, someone whose name would taste wrong if I ever said it out loud. The letter was the only way to touch him without touching him.
After that, I wrote letters to my younger self. To my mother. To every person who hurt me and then had the audacity to keep breathing. I didn’t send those either. But unsent doesn’t mean unwritten. The confession still stains the page. The crime still happens.
And me? Now? I don’t write love letters to be loved back. I write them to trap someone between the lines. I write them so they’ll have to keep me — even if it’s in a shoebox under their bed, even if it’s twenty years later when they find it again and curse my name.
I’ve never been able to just read a letter. I consume it. I chew on the vowels. I make the paper sweat. I underline until the meaning bleeds. Lovers are sentences; I am the marginalia. And when I’m done, the letter is not theirs anymore. It’s mine.
It’s always mine.