Chapter 3 – Selene's First Letter
The stationery had been sitting on her desk for three nights. Cream-colored, thick enough that the ink wouldn't bleed through, tucked neatly into the folder the program had mailed her when she signed up. She had opened the folder the first evening with curiosity, then pushed it aside with a guilty laugh, as though she had been caught reaching for something she wasn't allowed.
Now, on the fourth night, she sat at the small wooden desk pushed against the corner of her apartment, staring at the blank page as if it were an adversary.
Her apartment was quiet in a way that magnified her own pulse. The refrigerator hummed softly from the kitchen. Outside, a car door slammed, then silence again. No music, no voices, no interruptions — only the empty glow of the lamp on her desk and the accusing whiteness of the page.
Selene tapped the pen against her thumbnail, a nervous habit she had carried since childhood. Write, she told herself. That's the point. That's why you agreed to this.
But the words caught in her throat even before they reached the page.
The program had promised anonymity. "No names, no addresses, no identifying details," the brochure had assured her. "Just letters carried by hand from one lonely person to another. Sometimes strangers can listen in ways that friends and family cannot."
The logic had appealed to her at the time. It seemed safer, somehow, to hand her secrets to someone faceless. Yet now, with the pen poised, she realized how dangerous it felt to reveal anything at all.
Her first attempt started with: I'm writing because I don't know where else to put these words. She stared at the sentence until shame prickled hot across her skin. She tore the page in half, then again, until the strips filled her wastebasket.
The second attempt began: Sometimes I feel like screaming, but I smile instead. That one made her sound melodramatic, like the kind of patient she counseled at the clinic, urging them to find healthier outlets. Hypocrite. She crushed the page into a ball and hurled it across the room.
The third attempt didn't even survive the first line. Her pen scratched, hesitated, hovered, then dragged an angry black streak down the page. She ripped it, folded it into a sharp corner, and pressed it into the drawer of her desk as though she could bury the evidence.
Her hand shook now. A fourth sheet stared up at her, its clean edges both forgiving and demanding.
She took a slow breath. Stop editing yourself, she told herself. Stop rewriting your pain into something palatable.
The pen touched paper again, and this time she didn't lift it until the words formed.
I don't know who you are, and maybe that's the point. I don't talk about these things with anyone else. Not my sister, not my friends, not anyone. But I'm tired of being invisible. Some nights it feels like I could vanish and no one would notice.
Her handwriting tilted awkwardly, the lines uneven. But there it was — truth in ink. Her chest ached as she stared at it, ashamed and relieved in the same breath.
Selene folded the page quickly, hands moving faster than her mind. She slid it into the plain envelope, pressed the flap shut with her palm, and held it in her lap for a long time.
The paper was warm now, as though it carried part of her heartbeat.
She imagined the letter passing through unknown hands, carried away to someone whose face she'd never see. A stranger. Perhaps a kind one. Perhaps careless. Perhaps no one at all.
But still — the letter existed. The words existed outside of her body now.
She set the envelope on the corner of the desk. Tomorrow, she would drop it into the program's postbox. Tonight, she allowed herself the smallest of victories: she had written something she hadn't destroyed.
For the first time in years, Selene felt that a secret had escaped her — not loud, not bold, but free.