A little over a year after my husband passed away, I finally felt ready to go through the drawers of his nightstand.
The top drawer was filled with small, everyday things—pens, business cards, ticket stubs from concerts we went to together. It looked like whatever he had in his pockets at the end of the day simply ended up there. Seeing those little pieces of our life made my chest ache, but it also reminded me how present he had always been in the details.
In the bottom drawer, I found more personal treasures: a couple of his sketchbooks, a folder of poems he had written long ago, and more folders filled with D&D characters and maps he had created. I smiled, remembering how he would spend hours building worlds, drawing, imagining.
And then, beneath all of that, I found something I never expected—a folder with my name on it.
Inside, carefully unfolded and neatly kept, were the love letters I had written to him during my senior year of high school. I had no idea he had kept them all these years. Seeing them brought back a flood of memories—our early days, our nervous excitement, the soft beginnings of a love that would carry us through three decades.
For the first time since he passed, I felt myself smiling at those memories without breaking down in tears. I remembered being 18, and he was 20—young and reckless and hopelessly in love. And just like he did for the next 30 years, he made me laugh even then, teasing me in those letters, telling me all the things he would rather do with me than simply sit there.
Discovering those letters reminded me that our love story hadn’t ended; it had just changed form. And in that moment, I felt him close again—warm, familiar, and forever mine.
0 Comments