Every Sunday, my friend Cora writes a letter to her mother in Cebu.
Not an email. A letter, in her own hand, on paper she buys from a small shop in Osaka that smells like cedar and old books. She writes about the cold, about the vending machines that still surprise her, about the cherry blossoms she has seen for the fourth spring in a row and still cannot describe without sounding like she is making it up.
She never sends them.
They sit in a shoebox under her bed, forty-three of them now, each one folded into thirds the way her mother taught her to fold laundry, precise and without wasted motion.
I found one by accident while looking for an umbrella. I read only the first line before stopping myself.
“Why don’t you send them?” I asked that evening over instant rice and leftover adobo she had made taste almost right.
She thought about it the way Cora thinks about most things, quietly, without rushing.
“My mother worries,” she said. “When I call her I tell her everything is fine. Good job, good health, good friends.” She looked at the window where the rain was doing what Osaka rain does in November. “And it is fine. It is all true.”
“But?”
“But fine is not the whole story.” She set down her chopsticks. “The letters are the rest of the story. The parts that would make her feel she made a mistake, letting me come here.”
I did not say anything for a moment.
“So who are you writing them for?”
She looked toward the bedroom where the shoebox sat in the dark.
“For myself, I think,” she said. “So I don’t forget that missing someone is not the same as being lost.”
Outside the rain picked up.
Later I heard her at the desk again, pen moving. I did not ask what she wrote. Some things are not ours to read until the person who wrote them is ready to hand them over.
I think someday she will send them.
I think she is almost ready.
