The stationery was heavy, cream-colored, and smelled faintly of cedar. Silas sat at his desk, the nib of his fountain pen hovering over the page like a diver afraid of the heights. He wasn't ill, but he was old enough to hear the clock ticking louder than the television.
He didn't want to leave a legal document; he wanted to leave a haunting.
"To whoever has to clear out this desk," he began, his handwriting a jagged script of loops and thorns. "I suspect it will be you, Sarah. You were always the one who looked for things that were lost."
He stopped. He thought of the decades spent in silence, the apologies he'd swallowed until they turned into gall. He realized that a death letter shouldn't be a tombstone—it should be a window.
The Weight of the Unsaid
"I spent forty years being a man of granite," he wrote. "I thought being immovable was the same as being strong. I was wrong. Strength is the willow that bends; I was the oak that cracked in the first real storm. Do not mourn the oak. It was tired of standing."
He moved to the practicalities, but even they felt poetic in the shadow of the end. He wrote about the hidden key in the birdhouse, the one that opened the box containing his mother's pearls and his own failed poetry. He wrote about the garden, instructing them to let the ivy take the south wall because "the house deserves a blanket."
The Final Instruction
The middle of the page was a list of truths he had been too proud to admit:
The Silence: "I heard every time you knocked on my door. I just didn't know how to be the person you needed."
The Regret: "I should have danced at the wedding. My knees would have hurt, but my heart would have been lighter."
The Love: "It was always there, under the granite. I hope you find it in the quiet."
Silas signed his name, the ink blooming into the fibers of the paper. He didn't feel the cold dread he had expected. Instead, he felt a strange, buoyant lightness. By putting his ending on paper, he had reclaimed the middle of his story.
He folded the letter and tucked it into a book Sarah loved. He wouldn't wait for the end to start living. He stood up, grabbed his coat, and walked out into the crisp evening air, leaving the paper to wait for its time.