She had spent hours trying to get his smile right.
The drawing sat on her desk, half-shadowed by the late afternoon light — a pencil sketch of his face, careful and soft, captured the way she remembered him on good days. She had erased and redrawn his eyes more times than she could count — not because she got them wrong, but because they made her feel too much.
It wasn't just graphite on paper.
It was a quiet confession.
And with it, she planned to give him a letter — the first real one she ever wrote for him.
She remembered whispering to herself before she began:
"Okay, so I'm finally writing this."
Not a love letter. Not exactly.
Just... an honest one.
A piece of herself, wrapped in courage and folded gently behind every line.
She poured everything into it — the gratitude she never found the words to say, the quiet admiration she had carried like a secret, the fragile hope that maybe, somehow, they could be real friends.
It wasn't dramatic.
It wasn't poetic.
It was simply human.
She wrote about the perfume — how she hoped it had made him smile. How it wasn't meant to confuse him or make him uncomfortable. She just wanted him to feel appreciated. To feel seen. She told him she understood — if he didn't feel the same, if he never would — that she wasn't expecting anything in return.
All she wanted was to be known, even just for a moment.
She signed it with trembling hands, folded it once, and slipped it behind the portrait like it was something sacred.
But when the moment came, she couldn't do it.
Because by then, he had started looking through her.
Walking past her in the halls like she was made of fog.
No acknowledgment. No pause. Just absence.
She waited by the door of possibility — letter in hand, heart held open — but he never slowed down long enough for her to reach out.
And something inside her whispered not to force it.
What if it made him uncomfortable?
What if it shattered the fragile, invisible peace that still lingered between them?
What if he threw it away — not out of cruelty, but indifference?
So instead of giving it to him, she tucked the letter and the portrait into a drawer at home — beneath old notebooks and tangled earbuds.
She told herself it didn't matter.
But every time she opened that drawer, it ached.
Because the truth was: that letter had been a piece of her heart, spoken in ink when her voice had failed her. And now, she would never know if it might've changed anything — even a little.
Maybe it was better that way.
Maybe some letters are meant to stay unread.
Maybe some people are only meant to be loved from afar — quietly, respectfully, with enough space for them to walk away without ever knowing they were the reason someone else found the courage to feel deeply.
And so, she kept the letter.
Not for him.
For herself.
Because even if he never read it —
She would always remember the day she was brave enough to write it.