09/20/2026
Fun fact about me — if you ever write me a letter or leave me a little note I'll probably keep it for the rest of my life. I'm ridiculously sentimental like that. Small words mean more to me than people realize.
She has a box.
Or a drawer.
Or a specific place she returns to when she needs to remember that she has been loved — where the evidence lives in handwriting she recognizes and cards she's read so many times the folds have softened and birthday notes from people she doesn't see as often anymore and the random piece of paper someone left on her desk once that said something small and meant everything.
She kept all of it.
Not because she planned to. Not because she sat down and decided these things deserve preserving. Just because putting them in the trash felt like throwing away the feeling attached to them and she couldn't do it.
Still can't.
The words don't have to be profound.
That's what people don't understand about the way she receives written things — it doesn't need to be poetry or a grand declaration or something that took hours to compose. The thinking of you I slipped under the door. The you seemed stressed today and I wanted you to know I notice. The happy birthday with the small drawing in the margin because he knew she'd find the drawing funny.
Those land in her and stay.
Because someone stopped. In the middle of their own life with its own demands. And thought of her specifically enough to put it somewhere permanent. To make the thought into an object she could hold.
That's what the note actually is.
Proof that she crossed someone's mind.
Proof that she existed in someone's world enough to be worth the pause.
And she is ridiculously sentimental about that.
Because in a world that moves fast and forgets easily and communicates in things that disappear after 24 hours —
Someone made something that lasts.
For her.
And she will keep it.
For the rest of her life.
Without apology.
